---
title: "Changelog"
description: "What changed in KeepItLocal Redact for the web, one entry per month, in plain language."
canonical: https://keepitlocal.app/changelog
last-updated: 2026-09
---

# Changelog

What changed in KeepItLocal Redact for the web, one entry per month, in plain language.

## September 2026


**9 September 2026.** The web app is what is live. Everything below is what you can use today
with an account.

### What you can do now

- **Redact in the browser.** Open a file in a tab, review what was found, approve the marks and
  download the clean copy. The file itself is never uploaded. It is read and rewritten on your
  own machine.
- **Work with the formats you actually get sent.** PDFs and scans, images, Word, Excel and
  PowerPoint, OpenDocument, email with attachments, and plain text or data files.
- **Read scanned paper.** Text inside a scan or a photograph is recognised so that it can be
  found and covered. The language is picked for you, in thirteen languages, and you can override
  it.
- **Hide faces, signatures and logos in images**, either with a solid block or with a blur.
- **Find and replace across a whole document**, and save a set of rules as a template so the next
  person does the same job the same way.
- **Run a leak check before you send.** It reports what is still readable in a file, including
  hidden text, tracked changes and document properties.
- **Strip the extra data a file carries.** Author names, revision history, comments and camera
  data come out with the sanitiser.
- **Redact many files at once** and take the result as a single zip.
- **Prove what you did.** Every export can carry a certificate that anyone can check on our
  verification page without an account. The report can be downloaded, or shared through a link
  protected by a password you set.
- **See who did what.** The activity trail records exports, template changes and member changes
  for your workspace.
- **Change the address you sign in with.** Profile now has a Change email control. You give the
  new address and your current password, your other devices are signed out when it moves, and the
  change is on your activity trail. An account that signs in with Google keeps the address Google
  gives it.
- **Give people the right access.** Roles can be edited, and a single person can be granted or
  refused one permission without changing everyone else. Adding members is part of the Team plan.
- **Read only the pages that are scans.** A document that is mostly typed text with a few
  photographed pages is now recognised page by page, and only those pages are read as images. The
  typed pages are handled as text, which is faster and more accurate.
- **Open Outlook messages.** A saved .msg file opens the same way an .eml does, with the subject,
  the body and the message text all available to search and cover.
- **Trust the export without checking it yourself.** Every exported file is now read back and
  checked after it is written, and the certificate records that this check ran and passed.
- **Start a new workspace with templates already in it.** A workspace with no templates is offered
  five ready-made ones covering general, legal, HR, finance and source code work.
- **Send a document to a colleague for approval before you export it.** Pick a reviewer from your
  workspace and the marks, the decisions and a note go to them. The document does not: they open
  their own copy of the same file and the marks are laid over it. They approve, or send it back
  with a comment, and you are told inside the app. There is a Reviews page with everything waiting
  for you and everything you have sent.
- **Require a second person on every export.** A workspace on the Team plan can switch on the
  two-person rule, and from then on a certificate is only issued for a file a colleague has
  approved. The certificate and the public verification page name who approved it.
- **Put your own name and logo on the pages you share.** On the Team plan a workspace can set a
  public name, a logo and a colour, and they appear on shared reports, on the certificate page a
  recipient opens, and on the two documents built from those pages. Every one of them still says
  the certificate was issued by KeepItLocal Redact, because that is whose signature it carries.

- **See what a PDF is carrying, and what the export takes out.** The check that reads a file
  before you send it now lists each thing it found beside a note saying whether the export
  removes it: document code, the action that runs when a file opens, page actions, form scripts,
  attachments, hidden layers, annotations and the document properties. Text you can see on the
  page is the one thing marked as staying, because that is what redaction is for. The same list
  is written into the report that travels with the file.
- **Read the detector catalogue before you ask us for it.** A public page lists every value the
  engine looks for, the country or the area it belongs to, and whether a check digit has to pass
  before it is reported.
- **Answer a compliance questionnaire from a page.** A public mapping sets out GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA,
  GLBA, PCI DSS and FOIA requirement by requirement, with what the product does about each one
  and a link to the document that says so.
- **Hand a data protection officer one page.** It states what the server holds and what it never
  holds, how long each category is kept, and the three procedures they ask about: a subject
  access request, sharing a document with a vendor, and erasure.

- **Have a name found where the document says it is a name.** A name that follows a label such
  as Patient Name, Applicant or Attn, or a greeting such as Dear, Mr or Dr, is now proposed for
  redaction, in English and in Georgian. A capitalised word standing on its own is not, so
  headings, cities and product names are left where they are.

- **Choose what goes in the place of a value in a text file.** Instead of covering it with
  blocks you can write what kind of thing it was, such as [EMAIL]; write a short code worked
  out from the value itself, so the same value reads the same in every document you export;
  or keep the first and last characters and cover the middle. The choice applies to
  everything you accepted, and the report that travels with the file says which one you used.
- **Sign or stamp a page after you have redacted it.** Draw a signature with a mouse, a pen
  or a finger, or pick a PNG or JPEG from your computer, then drag it where it belongs on the
  page and resize it. One image per page, on the page you are looking at or on every page.
  The image is never uploaded. It is kept between sessions only if you ask for it, and then
  only in the browser on that computer.

### What changed

- Names are found on this device. The model that reads a page for people, companies and places
  is served by this app and runs inside the browser tab, so the text of your document is never
  sent anywhere. It is about 100 MB and it is downloaded once per browser, the first time you
  ask for names, and kept for the next time.
- Names are now found on scanned pages and photographs as well. A page with no text of its
  own is read first, and the boxes land on the words themselves, still as suggestions you
  accept one at a time.
- A batch run counts the names it finds and covers none of them. A name is a guess, and a batch
  has nobody to confirm it, so it is reported and left in place. To cover a name, open that file
  in the studio and accept it there.
- Shared reports and the certificate page can now carry your workspace branding instead of ours.
  The logo is the one thing this product stores about how you look, never about what is in a
  document; it is a picture you upload, kept with your workspace and shown to whoever opens your
  link.
- The colour you choose is checked for readability before it is saved, and a colour too pale to
  read on a white page is refused with the measurement it failed on.
- A shared link that carries a password stays unbranded until it is unlocked, so the gate does
  not say who sent it.
- The plan and pricing page now shows what a given volume costs, monthly or yearly.
- Large and awkward files were the focus of a lot of work. Big mailboxes and big spreadsheets are
  now read in pieces instead of all at once, so a heavy file no longer stalls the tab.
- Password reset by email works end to end.
- We published our privacy notice, terms, data processing agreement, sub-processor list and a
  trust page that explains how the product is built and what the server holds.
- Account and workspace deletion removes the data, and a full export of your data can be
  requested from settings.
- The audit trail is now tamper evident, so a missing or altered entry can be detected.
- Files are now recognised by what is inside them rather than by the name they arrive with. A
  spreadsheet saved as a .txt opens as a spreadsheet, and a file with a misleading name can no
  longer be treated as something it is not.
- The part of the product that does the reading and the covering is fetched once and kept, so
  opening the studio a second time starts straight away instead of downloading again.
- Certificates can now say who approved an export, alongside what was redacted and when.
- The signed-in pages are shorter. Each one carries a title and at most one sentence, with the
  longer explanation behind a link on the same page. Nothing was removed. The activity list is
  the clearest case: what each entry proves is now given once for the page instead of on every
  row.
- Templates can now name Swedish organisation numbers. They were already being found; the list
  of things a template could name had fallen behind, and it is now built from the detection
  itself rather than kept by hand.
- The public pages were rewritten. The front page opens with how this differs from a free
  browser tool and from a service that takes your document first, then says in one scroll what
  you can redact, what is found, what proves it, what a team gets, what an export cleans out of
  a file and what it costs. The detail sits on its own page: how it works and the full
  comparison.
- Every public page is now written in plain words. Nothing on them assumes you know what any of
  this is built from.

- The three new public pages are linked from the site navigation and the footer. The compliance
  mapping carries the same note as the legal documents: it has not been reviewed by a lawyer, and
  no row on it claims more than the document it links to.

- Two values the detector was reporting short are now reported whole. A telephone number written
  with brackets around the area code is covered from the opening bracket, and a medical record
  number written with dashes is covered to its last digit. Both were leaving part of the value
  readable on the exported page.
- A signature or a stamp placed on a page is burned into the page itself, the same way a black
  box is. It becomes part of the picture of the page and cannot be lifted back off the finished
  file as a separate image.

- The choice of replacement now works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument and email
  files as well as in text. A value can be covered with blocks, named by its kind, written as
  a short code worked out from the value, or shown with its first and last characters kept.
  A saved Outlook message still takes blocks only, because its parts have to keep the length
  they had for the file to stay readable.
- What is shown beside a finding in the review list is now the same partial mask the export
  writes, so the preview and the result read alike.
- The public pages now carry the details a search engine and an assistant read: one title
  and one sentence per page, a site map, and a page of answers written for assistants.
- A template now remembers which replacement you chose, alongside the mark style it already
  remembered.

- The operator console we run this service from now shows the health of the platform at a
  glance, so a failing email or a stalled cleanup job is noticed by us rather than reported by
  you.
- A zip dropped on Studio or File Sanitizer expands so the files inside can be checked or
  cleaned. A rar is refused, with a line that asks you to unzip it to a zip or drop the files
  inside.

### What to watch for

- **Read the certificate as evidence of the export, not of the review.** It records the file that
  came out and the rules that were applied. It cannot know whether a human approved the right
  marks.
- **Automatic detection is a first pass.** It is good at structured things such as national
  identifiers, card numbers, addresses and dates, and weaker at a name that only context reveals.
  A document that matters should still be read by a person before it leaves.
- **Anything found in a scan depends on the quality of the scan.** Faint or skewed pages will
  return less. Check the page preview rather than the count.
- **Some limits depend on your plan**, including the number of pages in one job and how much
  history is kept. The plan page lists the current numbers.
- **Adding members needs the Team plan.** On the individual plan the workspace is yours alone.
- **Branding needs the Team plan, and it changes the letterhead, not the proof.** If a workspace
  moves off Team its shared pages go back to ours on the next visit, and nothing is deleted. A
  branded page still names KeepItLocal Redact as the issuer, and the signature on the
  certificate is unchanged by any of it.
- **A review covers one exact file.** If the document is edited after it was sent, the reviewer's
  copy no longer matches and the approval does not carry over. Send it again.
- **An approval counts your redactions, it does not fingerprint them.** Removing any of them after
  an approval is refused at export, and adding more is allowed. Moving one is not detected yet, so
  a reviewer who wants the exact page back should ask for it to be sent again.
- **Metadata cleaning does not need an approval.** The two-person rule covers redaction, and
  stripping metadata adds nothing to a document, so those exports are still certified on their
  own.
- **You cannot review your own work.** The person who marks a document and the person who approves
  it are always two different people, and reviews need the Team plan.
- **The prices on the plans page are not final.** They are placeholders while the plans are being
  settled, and the page says so where they are shown.
- **A long document with only a few scanned pages may need a nudge.** The page by page check is
  deliberately cautious, so a mostly typed PDF that hides a handful of photographed pages can be
  treated as text throughout. If a page looks unsearchable, run "OCR all pages" on it by hand
  before you rely on the result.
- **The list of what an export strips is written for PDFs.** Images and Office files have their
  own metadata removed as well, but the list names objects that only a PDF has, so it is not shown
  for them.
- **The catalogue is what the engine looks for, not what it will find in your file.** A detector
  proposes; you decide. A name that only context reveals is still the weak point, and a document
  that matters should be read by a person before it leaves.
- **The compliance mapping states gaps as well as controls.** Where a row says something is open,
  it is open. Nothing on those pages has been audited by a third party.
- **The names pass reads the label, not the sentence.** It finds a name where the document
  announces one. A name mentioned in ordinary prose is still missed, and it asks for two words,
  so a greeting followed by a single surname is left alone. It also reads what follows the
  label without knowing what kind of name it is, so a company or a department after Name or
  Attn is proposed too, and it is proposed rather than applied: nothing is covered until you
  accept it. A document that matters should still be read by a person before it leaves.

- **A short value can be worked back out of its code.** The code is a one way calculation
  over the value, so it cannot be reversed directly, but anyone who can list the possible
  values can run the same calculation over each of them and compare. A date of birth, a
  postcode or an identifier with a known format is recoverable that way. Use the code to
  match records, not to hide a value that has few possibilities.
- **The choice of replacement is offered for text, and for Word, spreadsheet, presentation,
  OpenDocument and email files.** A PDF page and an image are redacted with solid boxes,
  because there the mark is drawn over the page rather than written into it, and a saved
  Outlook message takes blocks only.
- **A signature or a stamp is not a redaction.** It covers nothing, it is not counted on the
  certificate, and it does not stand in for an approval. The report names the pages that
  carry one.