"Redactions cannot be undone" assurance - Adobe Pro 2020

[SpudleyDudley21]

Hi - I'm not a computery/techie person at all so please excuse my basicness.

My work involves redacting highly sensitive documents (social care records). Previously, using Adobe Standard, redacted documents were printed and rescanned if sending by email, in case redactions could be undone.

However I've recenlty been treated to Pro, and Adobe assures once applied, redactions cannot be undone (unless there is access to the original document, which recipients will not have).

I need some assurances please. If the redactions on my documents could actually be undone by some tech genius, lives would literally be shattered. I need to convince my organisation the redactions are definitely permanent and fixed, as the printing/rescanning is tedious, time consuming and wasteful. But I completely understand the fear and reluctance to go with it.

Can anyone explain to me (in as jargon-less way as possible, if possible) how these redactions are permanent? Is the text beneath actually removed as well as covered?

Any info greatly appreciated

[Bernd Alheit]

The tool removes the text. It can't be undone.

[Dave__M]

I agree with Berndt.  Adobe has incorporated an excellent redaction tool, and once redacted, the information is gone from your document.  Be sure to have the tools scrub what's under the skin of the PDF - there's data that one does not see on the surface, such as meta tags, etc.

My best,

Dave

[Eric Dumas]

Just make sure that you redact document saved/exported/printed as pdf.

I am not sure how the redact tool works on scanned documents. This would the image of text instead of real text. I never tried that.

[Bernd Alheit]

You can use the tool also on scanned documents.

[Dave__M]

Draw a box around the parts of the image you wish to redact, and apply when happy with the selection.  It's very straight forward.

Dave