How Anoniza works

Anoniza finds personal information in text, PDFs, and images, and lets you remove it before you share the result. Here's exactly what happens when you use it.

The workflow

1. You paste text, or upload a PDF or image.
2. Processing happens locally, in your browser. For PDFs, Anoniza reads the document's existing text. For images, it runs on-device optical character recognition (OCR) to read any text in the picture.
3. Anoniza scans that text for recognizable personal information — names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, government ID numbers, and more.
4. You review every item it found: what type of information it is, how confident Anoniza is, and the exact text that matched.
5. You choose what to protect. Nothing is redacted automatically — you accept or reject each item.
6. Anoniza generates the protected result: matching text with placeholders like [NAME_1], a redacted PDF with the original content permanently removed from the selected areas (not just visually covered), or a redacted image with the same guarantee.
7. You copy or download the protected result.

About the OCR step

When you upload an image, Anoniza uses an on-device OCR engine (Tesseract) to read text out of the picture. This runs entirely in your browser — the image is never uploaded anywhere for this step.

Honest limitations

• OCR can misread text, especially in low-resolution, blurry, or unusually formatted images. Always check the review list against the original image before trusting the result.
• No automated system — Anoniza included — can guarantee it will detect every possible piece of sensitive information in every document. Review the detected items yourself before sharing anything sensitive.
• Some detections are intentionally lower-confidence (for example, names that Anoniza isn't fully sure about) and are left unchecked by default so you decide whether to include them.