From The Verge earlier this week:
During Meta’s antitrust trial today, lawyers representing Apple, Google, and Snap each expressed irritation with Meta over the slides it presented on Monday that The Verge found to contain easy-to-remove redactions. Attorneys for both Apple and Snap called the errors “egregious,” with Apple’s representative indicating that it may not be able to trust Meta with its internal information in the future. Google’s attorney also blamed Meta for jeopardizing the search giant’s data with the mistake.
Presumably, the folks from Meta used a PDF editor to draw a black vector box around the sections to be redacted. The problem with this technique is that you can open up that same PDF in an editor and delete the box to see what’s underneath.
The correct solution would have been to rasterize the PDF (which is the process of turning vectors to pixels), so any attempt to remove the redacting box would reveal an empty area. When you rasterize a page, you’re essentially baking the PDF.
You can properly redact a PDF digitally, but botched digital redactions are so commonplace (and at times disastrous and/or humiliating) that when then Attorney General William Barr released the Mueller Report in 2019, the DOJ printed the unredacted original, did the redactions on paper, and then scanned it back in to create the redacted PDF.
But there’s an easier way: use Retrobatch of course!
The workflow would look something like this:
You read the PDF, split the pages up, add a matte background to each page which also happens to rasterize it as well, paste the pages back together with the PDF Maker node, and then write the PDF back out.
You can also control the resolution of the rasterization by using the “Set DPI” node before the page splitter.
I think there’s enough specialized PDF tasks that need to be done that I should probably make whole PDF category in Retrobatch, including a standard PDF rasterization node.