What Can an All-in-One Redaction System Do for You?

A dozen emails, 27 text messages, and a voice mail or two. All within five minutes. Does this sound like your life? Working in the Information Age means being constantly bombarded with distractions. How many times have you started a project, only to be interrupted by a stream of notifications? Probably quite often. Perhaps you’ve even received a notification while reading this.

So how bad are these distractions? According to Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine, it takes close to 24 minutes to get back on task after you’ve been distracted. 24 minutes. That’s almost half an hour. Opening up another document while responding to an email? Looking at a Twitter notification as you finish a report on an entirely unrelated matter? Trying to work on separate projects across multiple applications? It’s costing you.

Every time you come back to the task at hand, you’re not picking off where you’ve left off. You’re restarting the thing you were doing right before you got distracted. Maybe that’s all right if you’re working on a relatively simple task. When you’re dealing with a detail-oriented task, such as redacting personally identifiable information in videos, audio files, images, or PDFs, it’s another story. Losing focus makes it much harder to get back in the zone—opening you up to mistakes, wasted time, and frustration.

To be effective, most organizations have to rely on databases filled with personal information on customers, clients, employers, and others that they do business with or serve. It’s how they stay on top of correspondence, transactions, records requests, and other business activities. Without this information, they can’t run a high-performing organization, let alone one that treads water. However, managing data isn’t as simple as password protecting an excel file or locking down access to video footage. It takes constant monitoring, the implementation of human and information system controls, and an understanding of the risk environment you operate in.

What can organizations responsible for maintaining, releasing, and redacting information do to work more productively and avoid the improper release or exposure of information? In today’s Evidence article, we’ll cover how using an all-in-one redaction system can help organizations work smart, avoid lawsuits, and prevent reputational harm.

The Current Informational Landscape

In the United States, 96% of adults own a cellphone. Of that group, 81% have a smartphone. The city of Chicago has 35,000 CCTV cameras in it, while London has close to 628,000. Is it any wonder video data is now a standard part of daily business? Cameras are used for purposes ranging from essential security monitoring to tracking interactions between the public and law enforcement officers. Due to the nature of camera-based surveillance, it’s common for information gathered on the video to contain the personal information of individuals. It can include:

• Faces
• Identifying marks
• Cellphone or monitor screens
• License plates

In fact, there are many items that can be considered personal identifying information (PII) based on the way a company uses surveillance technology. It’s why we wrote an entire article discussing the types of PII, personal health information, and sensitive information out there.

Having a quality video redaction system can alleviate the privacy concerns associated with the collection of video data. CaseGuard’s video redaction tool uses machine learning, AI, and automation controls that make it easy to redact any personally identifying information from video footage. In this video, you can see how CaseGuard’s software removes hundreds of faces in a video instantly.

It’s quite convenient. CaseGuard’s features allow automatic facial, license plate, computer screen, MDT, and MDC screen redaction and detection. Highlighting any object in the video will allow automatic tracking and redaction throughout. For organizations that have to release or store footage, this feature is a significant time-saver. CaseGuard also enables you to record a complete chain of history on the video as well as any redaction work reports. Our customers in law enforcement who have to explain a chain of evidence when presenting data to the courts, as well as the businesses we’ve worked with that need versioning history so they can monitor changes over time, have found this tool to be extremely useful.

Once a video is viewed, companies may be required to store the data for a set period. Using video redaction before storage will allow only the information needed to be stored without storing the individual’s private information. This significantly cuts the risk to the individual and the company. Even in the event of a data breach, the information stored does not contain personally identifiable information (PII), and the company is clear of violating privacy laws.

Audio Redaction

For legal reasons and well as quality assurance purposes, many organizations save audio recordings. If you’d discussing calling customer service, making purchases over the phone, or reporting an incident, chances are you’re being recorded for training, compliance, or quality assurance purposes. Depending on the organization, these records can be maintained for a lengthy period.

CaseGuard makes it easy to mute, bleep, and transform audio data, regardless of whether it’s stored in a video or other media format. If you need to merge files from audio or video, you can—with a complete record of any redaction or modification history, so you can see what’s been stored, extracted, modified, and deleted. CaseGuard’s leverages AI and machine learning to make it easy for companies to search for specific data, and redact it automatically. Want to find a string of numbers that fit a specific format, such as the format for social security numbers or credit card numbers? You can. CaseGuard can quickly go through the audio and remove that information in just a few clicks, leaving the remaining information intact. Locating PII within audio files and then muting or bleeping it has never been more automatic or easy. Likewise, CaseGuard makes it painless to re-sample or change the sound or tone of an individual’s voice to conceal their identity.

Document Redaction

Document redaction is exceptionally common in the law enforcement, financial, healthcare, legal, security, and education sectors. Organizations and third parties store medical history, routing numbers, social security numbers, trade secrets, and more.

To make document redaction easier, CaseGuard allows you to search for words, paragraphs, sections, or specific pages instantly. Best of all, it has multiple ways of exploring and redacting documents. Using CaseGuard, you can locate any word, sentence or paragraph, or page, then quickly redact it. Patterns, such as zip codes, social security numbers, phone numbers, credit card numbers, and even emails, can be entered as identifiers and searched for within documents—and removed instantly. Is your document a handwritten note or set in a strange font? That’s not a show stopper. CaseGuard’s redaction system is designed to be customizable to your needs. It handles a variety of documents, including Optical Character Recognition (OCR) documents and non-OCR documents. This means that your material can be processed and redacted in some capacity, regardless of whether there’s typed, handwritten, or printed text.

Image Redaction

Like video, an organization may have a variety of images or photos that include a person’s private information. These images may need to be stored for a significant amount of time. Before storage, images also need to be checked for personal information that requires redaction.

CaseGuard has original features that save time and money by allowing businesses to quickly load thousands of images and redact faces and other information automatically. Watch CaseGuard in action in the video below, where you’ll see how CaseGuard can automatically capture license plates from a variety of angles and redact from thousands of photos in just one click.

Having It All: Can You Get All Your Redaction Needs Met in One System?

We can’t promise you everything, but we can guarantee that CaseGuard will cut down the time you spend redacting documents, videos, images, and audio. Skip going back and forth between six separate software programs. With CaseGuard, don’t have to undergo multiple training processes or memorize every different export process for all of your applications. You can handle all of your redaction needs in one place. You’ll save time on training employees, cut down on task switching, and get more done sooner.