Anonymising documents
Feature on video · Length 0:38
Applications to the department, documents to the works council, files to a service provider: before they move on, everything personal in them has to go. By hand that is line-by-line, page-by-page work. Document anonymisation takes the pass over the document off your hands and only presents the spots it is not sure about.
Placeholders instead of black bars
You hand over the document as a PDF. skai reads it page by page and replaces every personal detail it finds with a placeholder for its kind: [First name], [Address], [Date of birth], [Phone number]. Instead of a black rectangle the document says what stood there. Whoever reads it later still understands its structure.
skai deliberately does not assign pseudonyms: a name does not become a “person A” that can be recognised across the document. Handwriting is treated like print, a signature becomes [Signature], a glued-in photo becomes [Image]. Processing runs on our own servers, without a cloud service, and a document you hand over is visible only to you – not to administrators either.
What stays readable
One set of rules applies to every document; no category stays readable for a single case or recipient. Every name of a private individual is replaced, whether applicant, case worker, doctor or witness.
What stays readable are organisations and functions, legal bases, legal entities, procedural data, amounts, nationality and marital status. The document remains traceable as a case, even though the person in it is gone.
Check, complete, export
After the run you only check the marked spots. You decide an uncertain placeholder with “Apply” or “Leave readable”. A passage the reading model only deciphered with doubt is corrected in the read text and confirmed with “Correct”. A detail the run missed you mark yourself and choose its kind; if none from the catalogue fits, you create your own – skai then searches the document again for the same detail.
The “Review progress” card counts how many spots have been checked and shows the number per placeholder kind as well. Once everything is decided, “Complete” makes the version unchangeable and you export it as a PDF.
What is said in the video
The spoken text of the video, section by section.
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This application gets passed on. To the department, to the works council, into the archive.
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First everything personal has to go. Until now that means line by line, page by page, by hand.
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With skai you simply drop the PDF in. A good minute later a placeholder sits on every detail it found.
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Not a black bar, but the kind of detail. And you only decide what skai has marked.
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Complete it, export it, done. Redacting by hand turns into a short look at the open spots.
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Document anonymisation in skai. More on our website.