How to redact a driver's license scan before sharing it
Landlords, HR departments, notaries, and verification services keep asking for a scan of your ID — and copies of those scans end up in inboxes, shared drives, and breach dumps. A license scan is a ready-made identity kit. Share only the parts the situation actually requires.
What to redact on an ID scan
- Redact: the license/ID number. It's a persistent identifier used for account verification — the top target on the card.
- Redact: the barcode on the back. The most-missed item. That PDF417 barcode encodes everything printed on the card (and sometimes more) in machine-readable form. If your scan includes the back, black the barcode out entirely.
- Usually redact: your home address — most verifications are about who you are or how old you are, not where you sleep.
- Context-dependent: date of birth. Proving age? Keep DOB, redact the number and address. Proving identity to someone who knows you? Often the photo and name suffice.
- Keep: name and photo, plus whatever the specific recipient legitimately needs — and it's fair to ask them exactly what that is.
Honest exception: some checks are legally required to see the full document (I-9 employment verification, TSA, bank KYC). Don't redact those — this guide is for the landlord who "just needs a copy for the file."
Why this needs real redaction
An ID scan is exactly the document you don't want to upload to a random "free PDF editor" — you'd be feeding an identity-theft kit to an unknown server to avoid leaking it. And a drawn-on rectangle in a PDF app can sit on a separate layer that's trivially removed. The marked pixels have to be destroyed, on your own machine.
Redact your ID scan in three steps
- Drop the scan on redactoronline.com. (If it's a JPG or photo, print/save it to PDF first.) It opens in your browser and never uploads — pull your Wi-Fi and it keeps working.
- Mark the number, address, and barcode. ID scans are images, so drag boxes directly — or run "Scan (OCR)" first (on-device) and use "Auto-detect PII" to catch numbers automatically.
- Click "Redact & download". Marked areas are destroyed at the pixel level and the file is rebuilt clean, with no metadata from your scanner or phone.
Common questions
Why redact the barcode if the front is already redacted? Because the barcode duplicates the whole card in machine-readable form — a phone app reads it in one scan. Redacting the printed number while leaving the barcode redacts nothing.
Can I mark boxes on a photo-based PDF without OCR? Yes — right-drag draws a free-form box anywhere on the page. OCR is only needed if you want text search and auto-detection to work on the scan.
Does the scanner/phone metadata come out too? Yes — the output is rebuilt from scratch with empty metadata. Device info, timestamps, and location tags from the original file don't survive.