Remove personal data from your PDFs before you share them
Bank statements, payslips, visa letters, tenancy agreements and NHS correspondence all carry more personal data than the recipient actually needs. DocClean detects and redacts that data — and converts or compresses the result — entirely inside your browser. Your document is never uploaded to a server.
Redact PDF
Automatically detect names, National Insurance numbers, emails, phone numbers, postcodes, bank details and more using OCR, then draw manual blocks over anything the detector misses. Choose a compliance profile (Maximum Privacy, CCPA/CPRA-lite, Social sharing, or a fully custom rule set) and export a version that has the sensitive content permanently removed rather than merely hidden.
OpenConvert PDF
Turn a redacted or original PDF into other formats you can actually use — page images, a Word-compatible document, or a bundled archive — without the file ever leaving your device.
OpenCreate ZIP archive
Bundle multiple files into a single ZIP archive to make them easier to email or upload as one attachment. ZIP compression is lossless and works best on text-heavy files — already-compressed formats like most PDFs, JPEGs and videos may shrink little or not at all. Best run after redaction, on the final safe version of a document.
OpenHow it works
Load a PDF
Drag one in or choose a file. It's read directly in your browser's memory.
Detect & redact
OCR flags likely personal data; add manual blocks for anything specific to your document.
Export & verify
Download the redacted file, then search and copy/paste-test it before you send it on.
Why does it matter that processing happens on your device?
Most online PDF tools work by uploading your file to a remote server, processing it there, and sending back a result. That means trusting a third party with whatever is inside the document — often exactly the kind of sensitive material you're trying to redact in the first place. DocClean runs PDF rendering, OCR and redaction locally, in your browser's memory, so the document itself never has to leave your computer to be processed.
That said, no tool replaces your own judgement. After exporting, always search the result for names, postcodes or reference numbers and try copy/pasting text from the redacted areas — the difference between real redaction and simple masking is exactly whether that test passes.
Guides for specific document types
Different documents carry different risks. These guides cover what to redact — and what to leave in — for common UK document types.
Latest from Resources
A document-sharing security checklist before you hit send
A practical, one-page checklist to run through before sharing any sensitive document — whether or not you use DocClean to prepare it.
How OCR affects PDF privacy — and why redaction tools use it
Optical character recognition is what lets a redaction tool find text in a scanned document. Here's how it works and what its limits are.
What actually survives a DocClean export (verified against the code)
A transparent look at what DocClean's export step keeps and discards — based on how the export function is actually built, not marketing claims.