The Eraser is a free browser-based PII scrubber and redaction tool for personally identifiable information. Drag and drop a PDF or image, and it automatically detects and redacts sensitive data — names, email addresses, phone numbers, IDs, addresses, and more. All processing happens locally on your device with no data ever leaving your browser.

Advanced pattern matching and named-entity recognition covers: full names, email addresses, phone numbers, Belgian/EU national IDs, IBAN/bank account numbers, physical addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth, social security numbers, and IP addresses. You can also manually select and redact any additional sensitive content the tool misses.

Yes. For image files and scanned PDFs, The Eraser uses Tesseract.js — an open-source OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine that runs entirely in your browser — to extract text before scanning for PII patterns. No images are sent to external OCR services or AI APIs.

Absolutely not. The Eraser is 100% local and offline. Your files are processed entirely in your browser using PDF.js, Tesseract.js, and pdf-lib. Nothing is uploaded to any server, cloud service, or AI API. The tool even works offline once the page has loaded.

Input formats: PDF files (both text-based and scanned), PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, and WEBP images. Output format: Always a redacted PDF with PII masked using solid black boxes over detected sensitive regions for legal document compliance.

Very high accuracy for structured data like email addresses, phone numbers, IBANs, and national IDs. Free-form names and physical addresses may occasionally be missed or produce false positives. Always review the redaction preview carefully before downloading. The manual redaction tool lets you highlight and redact anything the automatic detection missed.

Yes. Because no data ever leaves your device, The Eraser is compatible with GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and other data protection regulations. You remain the sole controller of your data at all times. Note: This is not a certified compliance product — verify your organization's specific regulatory requirements independently.

Yes. After automatic detection, use the manual redaction tool to select and black-box any additional sensitive content. This is crucial for specialized data (medical terms, account numbers, proprietary information) that pattern matching might miss.

Your file exists only in your browser's memory during processing. When you close the tab, all data is immediately discarded. No persistent storage, no logs, no cookies are created related to your files. Complete privacy and data deletion guaranteed.

Yes, completely free. One of 52 free tools available at jasperbernaers.com. No account, no signup, no limits on the number of documents you can redact — unlimited PDF redaction and image anonymization.