Published on August 25, 2026 · 8 min read
Most people focus on names, phone numbers, and ID numbers when they redact a document. Those are the obvious ones. But a lot of what leaks isn't in the body text at all.
Here are five places people usually forget to check.
If you take a photo of a signed contract with your phone and send the image, the file carries more than the image. Modern phone cameras embed EXIF metadata — GPS coordinates, device model, date and time, and sometimes the shutter count.
Right-click the file → Properties → Details, and you can see the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. On Android, some camera apps even embed the user's name if it's configured. You can't see any of it by just looking at the image, but it's in there.
To check: on Windows, right-click the file → Properties → Details. On macOS, open the image in Preview → Tools → Show Inspector. On phone, most camera apps have a "remove location" or "strip metadata" option before sharing.
PDF editors let people leave comments in the margin — sticky notes, highlights, even voice annotations. Those comments are separate objects in the PDF file, not part of the body text. If you flatten the page and redact the visible content, the comments can still be there.
A common scenario: a contract gets reviewed by two people. One reviewer writes "check clause 4.2 with legal" in a sticky note. The contract is sent to the client with all the body text clean. The sticky note goes with it.
In Adobe Acrobat, use "Remove Hidden Information" under the Protection tab. In most PDF viewers, there's no easy way to see comments unless the comment panel is open. That's why they get missed.
This one is easy to forget because we don't think of file names as content. But they often carry information.
A file named Invoice_AcmeCorp_Q3_Dispute.docx already tells the recipient three things: who the client is, that there's a dispute, and which quarter. The body text might be fully redacted. The file name still gives context.
Before sending, rename the file to something neutral — Invoice.docx or Document_Q3.docx. Takes two seconds.
Excel files cause more problems here than most people realize. When someone "hides" a column, they're not deleting it — they're setting a display property. Right-click → Unhide, and everything comes back.
Say the visible columns are "Name" and "Title". The hidden columns next to them contain Social Security numbers and salary. Nobody sees them until they right-click and unhide.
Before sending an Excel file: select all columns, right-click, Unhide. Do the same for rows. Then delete whatever you don't want. "Hidden" doesn't mean gone.
Phone numbers, IDs, and email addresses show up in different formats within the same document. The same phone number might be written as (555) 123-4567, 555-123-4567, or +1 555 123 4567. If you're redacting by hand and only search for one format, the others stay.
This is where pattern-based tools help. A regex that matches any of those formats will catch all of them. Manually typing each variation into a search box is slow and error-prone.
If you're doing this by hand, at least search for common variants: with and without spaces, with and without country codes, with and without parentheses. It won't catch everything, but it's better than one search per format.
Doing all five of these checks by hand is possible, but tedious. And the more files you're dealing with, the more likely something slips through.
DocRedactNow handles most of this automatically. It strips EXIF from images, removes PDF comments and annotations, and applies pattern rules that catch format variations. Everything runs locally — no uploads, no network calls.
There's a 14-day free trial, full features. Your files stay on your machine either way.
Try DocRedactNow free for 14 days.
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