Manual Text Redactor

Automated PII scrubbers are excellent at catching well-formatted data, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers, because those follow predictable patterns a regular expression can match. But a huge amount of genuinely sensitive text has no predictable pattern at all: a person's name, a company name, a street address written in prose, a case number in an unfamiliar format, or a passing reference to someone's role or location. No regex can reliably tell "Sarah Whitfield" or "the downtown branch" apart from any other pair of words in a sentence.

The Manual Text Redactor exists for exactly that gap. Paste in your text and every word becomes an individually clickable token. Click any word, or click and drag across a run of words, to black it out instantly, the same way you'd draw a redaction bar over a printed page. Click a blacked-out word again to restore it. Because you decide what counts as sensitive, this tool catches whatever context and judgment can identify that a pattern-matching scrubber cannot.

The redacted output is not just a visual overlay: the copyable and downloadable result actually replaces each redacted word's characters with solid block glyphs (█), so the original text is genuinely gone from the exported version, not merely hidden behind a CSS style that a copy-paste or a view-source could undo.

Everything runs locally in your browser using plain JavaScript. Nothing you paste, click, or export is ever uploaded, logged, or transmitted anywhere. This tool pairs naturally with the Sensitive Data Scrubber: run that first to catch every well-formatted email, phone number, or token automatically, then use this tool to manually black out anything else, such as names, places, or project codenames, that only a human reader would recognize as sensitive.