Omit Redact 1.0.0 beta 9

Ninth beta of Omit Redact. Fully offline PII detection and redaction for Windows.

What changed since beta.8

The review dialog is usable on a real document. Scanning an ordinary file produces hundreds of findings, and the dialog that lets you confirm them had three problems that compounded each other.

It had no height limit, so on a 437 finding scan the "Approve and redact" button ended up more than 8000 pixels down an 820 pixel window. The list now scrolls inside a bounded dialog and the button is pinned below it, always on screen.

The table was also wider than the dialog, which pushed the Redact checkbox column off the right edge entirely. The one control the screen exists for could not be reached without scrolling sideways.

And the columns were in the wrong order. The checkbox is the only thing you act on here, so it now leads each row, and the confidence figure moved to the far edge where it belongs. Nothing needs a sideways scroll any more.

Everything else is unchanged from beta.7, whose notes cover the Accuracy tier fix, the PDF that never finished, the block list that never reached a file, and the Verify screen.

Pick an installer

	Download	On disk	What you get
Offline	931 MB	1.5 GB	Every language, plus the Accuracy model. Never contacts the network.
Light	167 MB	517 MB	English and the Fast model. Other languages download on demand. Accuracy is not available.

Before you install

These installers are not code signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen will warn you and you will need to choose "More info" and then "Run anyway".

Omit Redact 1.0.0 beta 8

Eighth beta of Omit Redact. Fully offline PII detection and redaction for Windows.

What changed since beta.7

The review dialog could not be used on a real document. A scan of an ordinary file produces hundreds of findings, and every one of them was rendered into a dialog with no height limit. On a 437 finding scan the "Approve and redact" button ended up 8253 pixels down an 820 pixel window, so the only way to commit the run was to scroll past every row to reach it. The dialog is also centred, so a tall one ran off the top of the screen as well as the bottom.

The list now scrolls inside a bounded dialog and the approve button is pinned below it, always on screen whatever the finding count. The dialog is wider too, since a four column table was cramped.

Everything else is unchanged from beta.7, whose notes cover the Accuracy tier fix, the PDF that never finished, the block list that never reached a file, and the new Verify screen.

Pick an installer

	Download	On disk	What you get
Offline	931 MB	1.5 GB	Every language, plus the Accuracy model. Never contacts the network.
Light	167 MB	517 MB	English and the Fast model. Other languages download on demand. Accuracy is not available.

Before you install

These installers are not code signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen will warn you and you will need to choose "More info" and then "Run anyway".

Omit Redact 1.0.0 beta 7

Seventh beta of Omit Redact. Fully offline PII detection and redaction for Windows.

A correction, first

The Accuracy tier has been returning nothing on real documents since it shipped. It had no chunking, and transformer attention costs grow with the square of the input, so anything past roughly 10 KB of text ran out of memory and came back with zero detections. A 28 KB text file died after 52 seconds trying to allocate 17.5 GB. The run reported success. Because Accuracy ships only in the offline installer, and because the failure was silent, every offline user redacting a document of ordinary length got nothing back and no warning that anything had gone wrong.

It is fixed. Text is now processed in overlapping windows, with the overlap de-duplicated so nothing is counted twice and nothing falls in a seam. Anything at or under one window is handled exactly as before. That same 28 KB file now returns 407 detections in 51 seconds.

A PDF that never finished now takes about three seconds

Any PDF containing a table border or a rule under a heading was routed through image recognition, on every page. A one point rule is two pixels tall, and the recognizer scales the short side up before reading, which turned a thin line into a 286 megapixel image. A six page text-layer PDF took over thirteen minutes without finishing and reached 20 GB of memory, at which point the machine is swapping rather than working, so it looks idle while getting nowhere.

Image recognition now runs only when a page actually contains an image. On our test document:

	Before	After
Six page PDF	over 13 min, never finished	3.2 seconds
Peak memory	20,004 MB	57 MB

It also became more accurate, not less. The eight findings that disappeared were all misreadings of text that was already readable directly, such as 1.brandtner@ for l.brandtner@. No real personal data was lost.

Redact needed two clicks, and the review sometimes never appeared

Pressing Redact could do nothing at all. Switching between Files, Text and Email, or moving to Settings, discarded whatever was in flight: typed text, a scan waiting for review, the run itself. The result was a dead-looking button and a review you never got.

A run now survives leaving the screen it started on. Start a file redaction, go to Settings, come back, and it is still going or waiting for you. There is also a progress bar along the bottom of the window that keeps reporting from wherever you are, including which page of a PDF is being read.

The block list applied to the clipboard and nothing else

Terms entered in the block list are described as values that must never leave a document. That was true of the clipboard guard and untrue of every file, because the file, text and email screens were sending a freshly built default policy instead of the one you saved. Per type choices such as mask, hash or keep were discarded the same way. Both now reach every run.

Protect forgot its settings every time you opened the window

Protect keeps working after you close the main window, which is the point of it. But opening the window again overwrote its settings with defaults about half a second later, silently, without you touching anything. Its configuration is now read back from disk on open, and nothing is written until you actually change something.

New: Verify

Give Omit a file and the values that were supposed to have been removed from it, and it tells you whether they can still be recovered. It works on files any tool produced, not only ours, and it is free with or without a licence.

It reports three outcomes rather than two, because a check that could not run is not a pass. If part of a file cannot be examined, an image with no text layer for instance, it says so plainly instead of calling the file clean.

Also in this build

• The Accuracy tier was a paid capability that was only enforced on the clipboard lane. Files, text and email accepted it without a licence. It is now enforced everywhere, and a run that has to fall back to the faster model says so instead of quietly using it.
• A vault carried over from an older install could come back empty. The upgrade copied one file of what is a multi-file database, so anything not yet folded into the main file was left behind, and the check afterwards compared that file's size to itself. Every token would have become permanently unrecoverable. The copy is now made through the database engine and verified by counting rows.
• The detection model install was trusted on the basis of a marker file. A broken install therefore reported itself as present and then failed on every call, returning zero findings and reporting success. It is now verified properly, and a failure falls back to the standard model and tells you it did.

Pick an installer

	Download	On disk	What you get
Offline	931 MB	1.5 GB	Every language, plus the Accuracy model. Never contacts the network.
Light	167 MB	517 MB	English and the Fast model. Other languages download on demand. Accuracy is not available.

Before you install

These installers are not code signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen will warn you and you will need to choose "More info" and then "Run anyway". That is expected and it will stay that way until a certificate is in place.

Omit Redact 1.0.0 beta 6

Sixth beta of Omit Redact. Fully offline PII detection and redaction for Windows.

A correction, first

The beta.5 notes said BIC/SWIFT bank code detection had been fixed, and the numbers we published were real: they were measured against the actual fix. What they did not mention is that the fix had not been merged into the branch beta.5 was built from. The installer we shipped as beta.5 did not contain it. That gap is closed now: the fix is merged into main, this build is cut from that, and we checked the running code directly before publishing, not just the commit history.

What changed since beta.4

BIC/SWIFT bank codes went from clearly losing to clearly winning, against Google Cloud DLP on real prose. No real checksum exists for a SWIFT code, so we had deliberately kept its confidence low rather than flag an ordinary capitalized word as a bank code. That was the safe default and the wrong one to keep once it was costing a benchmark outright, so it now fires on structural validity alone.

Four languages had no bank-code or SIM-identifier detection at all. Chasing the BIC/SWIFT fix turned up a separate, older bug: Spanish, Italian, Polish and Finnish had zero detection for BIC/SWIFT, ICCID and IMSI, in the shipped app, not only in a benchmark. Fixed for all four.

JSON is now a supported redaction format, alongside text, CSV, Excel, PDF and images. It works differently from the others underneath: instead of parsing and rewriting the file, which would normalize spacing and number formatting even where nothing changed, Omit finds the exact position of every string value in the original file and only touches the characters that actually matched. A JSON file with no PII in it comes back byte-for-byte identical to what went in. Object keys are treated as context only, the same way a CSV column header is: a key is never scanned for PII and never redacted. If a key itself carries PII, an automated pass will not catch it today; that is a known, documented limitation, not a hidden one.

Pick an installer

	Download	On disk	What you get
Offline (recommended)	931 MB	~1.5 GB	Everything. All seven languages and the Accuracy model are bundled. It never touches the network, for anything, ever.
Light	167 MB	~517 MB	Fast tier with English. The other six languages download on request. No Accuracy tier, now or later.

If you want the Accuracy tier, take the offline installer. A light install cannot
fetch it afterwards.

Windows will warn you

Neither installer is code signed yet, so SmartScreen will show "Windows protected
your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway. That warning means the file has
no certificate, not that anything is wrong with it.

Omit Redact 1.0.0 beta 5

Fifth beta of Omit Redact. Fully offline PII detection and redaction for Windows.

What changed since beta.4

JSON is now a supported redaction format, alongside text, CSV, Excel, PDF and images. It works differently from the others underneath: instead of parsing and rewriting the file, which would normalize spacing and number formatting even where nothing changed, Omit finds the exact position of every string value in the original file and only touches the characters that actually matched. A JSON file with no PII in it comes back byte-for-byte identical to what went in. Object keys are treated as context only, the same way a CSV column header is: a key is never scanned for PII and never redacted. If a key itself carries PII, an automated pass will not catch it today; that is a known, documented limitation, not a hidden one.

BIC/SWIFT bank codes went from clearly losing to clearly winning. We benchmark ourselves against Google Cloud DLP on real prose, and BIC/SWIFT was our worst gap: a strict-match score of 0.25 against Google's 0.42. No real checksum exists for a SWIFT code, so we had deliberately kept its confidence low rather than flag an ordinary capitalized word as a bank code. That was the safe default and the wrong one to keep once it was costing a benchmark outright, so it now fires on structural validity alone. Measured score after the change: 0.9955.

Four languages had no bank-code or SIM-identifier detection at all. Chasing the BIC/SWIFT fix turned up a separate, older bug: Spanish, Italian, Polish and Finnish had zero detection for BIC/SWIFT, ICCID and IMSI, in the shipped app, not only in a benchmark. Fixed for all four.

Pick an installer

	Download	On disk	What you get
Offline (recommended)	931 MB	~1.5 GB	Everything. All seven languages and the Accuracy model are bundled. It never touches the network, for anything, ever.
Light	167 MB	~517 MB	Fast tier with English. The other six languages download on request. No Accuracy tier, now or later.

If you want the Accuracy tier, take the offline installer. A light install cannot
fetch it afterwards.

Windows will warn you

Neither installer is code signed yet, so SmartScreen will show "Windows protected
your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway. That warning means the file has
no certificate, not that anything is wrong with it.

Omit Redact 1.0.0 beta 4

Fourth beta of Omit Redact. Fully offline PII detection and redaction for Windows.

What changed since beta.3

A web address followed by a period lost its last character. The detector's own
match sometimes swallowed the sentence's closing period as if it were part of the
address, so https://example.com. was flagged as ending in a period that was never
part of the address. Fixed for every detector, not just web addresses: nothing
supported here legitimately ends a value in a period, comma or closing quote.

Two identifiers were missed outright. IMEI numbers printed with dashes, the way a
phone's own battery compartment shows them, were not recognized at all; only the
unbroken 15-digit form was. Both forms are found now. Web addresses ending in .biz
were silently cut down to .bi, a real but wrong country code that happens to share
those two letters; .biz and .store addresses are found in full now.

A vehicle identification number could lose to a wrong guess nearby. When the
general-purpose part of the engine confidently mislabeled a VIN as a place name, that
guess was allowed to win even though the exact-format match was the correct one. Web
addresses had the same problem for the same reason. Both are protected now.

Presidio, the open-source library part of our Fast tier is built on, moved to its
newest release. That carries a handful of accuracy fixes for identifiers we ship
unmodified, most notably a U.S. Social Security Number pattern that was refusing to
match some valid numbers.

Pick an installer

	Download	On disk	What you get
Offline (recommended)	931 MB	~1.5 GB	Everything. All seven languages and the Accuracy model are bundled. It never touches the network, for anything, ever.
Light	167 MB	~517 MB	Fast tier with English. The other six languages download on request. No Accuracy tier, now or later.

If you want the Accuracy tier, take the offline installer. A light install cannot
fetch it afterwards.

Windows will warn you

Neither installer is code signed yet, so SmartScreen will show "Windows protected
your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway. That warning means the file has
no certificate, not that anything is wrong with it.

Omit Redact 1.0.0 beta 3

Third beta of Omit Redact. Fully offline PII detection and redaction for Windows.

What changed since beta.2

Protect now leaves a sentence you can still read. Copying text used to give
back block glyphs, so anything you pasted into an assistant lost the shape of what
it was saying. Protect now writes <PERSON_1>, <EMAIL_ADDRESS_1>, <IBAN_CODE_1>,
numbered per type, and the same value keeps its number throughout. Two people stay
two people. Only the values are gone.

Protect uses its own policy for this, so a rule you set for file redaction no
longer changes what the clipboard does. Your block list still travels with it.

Credentials are never written to the vault. On vault retention, a block-listed
API key was stored as a resolvable token. Blocking a string is an instruction to
destroy it, so it is now numbered like everything else and nothing is kept. The
cost, deliberately: a blocked term can no longer be restored by Restore originals.

Spanish and Italian found no phone numbers at all. The stock recognizer was
replaced for some languages and removed for all of them, so a Spanish contract kept
every number in the clear while the coverage report said phone numbers were covered.
All seven bundled languages detect them now.

Phone detection is substantially better everywhere. Numbers the engine matched
were being overruled by other detectors and never reached the output: recall went
from 0.31 to 0.99. International numbers, and numbers in reserved ranges that
documentation and test data use, are now found. Bare seven and eight digit runs need
a phone word nearby, in any of the seven languages, so order and invoice references
stay as they are.

A long number could come back partly redacted. A sixteen digit run was split
into fragments, leaving four digits in the clear. Fixed, and the guard that fixed it
no longer drops a timestamp or a list of years.

The Protect notification actually works. It appeared in the top left, never went
away, and sat there empty. It now appears bottom right above the taskbar, on the
screen you are working on, and disappears after about two seconds. It cannot be left
on screen showing nothing.

The shield turns light when Protect is armed. It was dark ink on a navy tile,
which is 1.5:1 and effectively invisible. It is also larger now.

The pill's Redact button did something. It, and the manual redaction hotkey,
were wired to a command that did not exist, and the failure was swallowed silently.

The text screen shows one result, not three. The pane with the copy button, and
nothing after it.

Pick an installer

	Download	On disk	What you get
Offline (recommended)	928 MB	~1.5 GB	Everything. All seven languages and the Accuracy model are bundled. It never touches the network, for anything, ever.
Light	165 MB	~517 MB	Fast tier with English. The other six languages download on request. No Accuracy tier, now or later.

If you want the Accuracy tier, take the offline installer. A light install cannot
fetch it afterwards.

Windows will warn you

Neither installer is code signed yet, so SmartScreen will show "Windows protected
your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway. That warning means the file has
no certificate, not that anything is wrong with it.

Omit Redact 1.0.0 beta 2

Second beta of Omit Redact. Fully offline PII detection and redaction for Windows.

What changed since beta.1

The trial no longer starts by itself. In beta.1 the 15 day clock began the
moment you first opened the app, even if you only wanted Protect, which is free
forever. Now it starts when you ask for it, from the screen you were trying to
use. Install it today, use Protect for a month, and your trial is still waiting
whenever you decide to try file redaction.

If you are mid-trial from beta.1, nothing changes. Your remaining days carry over
exactly as they were.

The app tells you which build it is. Settings now names the version and lets
you copy it, which matters when you report something.

An update check you have to ask for. In Settings, off by default, and it never
runs on launch unless you turn it on. Nothing is checked in the background and
nothing is sent about you.

The uninstaller now asks before it deletes anything. Two separate questions:
downloaded models, which you can always fetch again, and your vault and data,
which you cannot. The second is never pre-selected, because deleting the vault
means documents you already redacted can never be restored.

A PDF fix worth naming. Some PDFs carry images inline in the page. Redacting
such a page silently dropped those images: a scanned signature could vanish with
nothing reported. Fixed, and a second case that used to be refused outright is now
redacted properly.

Pick an installer

	Download	On disk	What you get
Offline (recommended)	929 MB	~1.5 GB	Everything. All seven languages and the Accuracy model are bundled. It never touches the network, for anything, ever.
Light	165 MB	~517 MB	Fast tier with English. The other six languages download on request. No Accuracy tier, now or later.

If you want the Accuracy tier, take the offline installer. A light install cannot
fetch it afterwards.

Languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch.

Windows will warn you, and that is expected

These builds are not code signed yet. SmartScreen will show "Windows protected
your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway.

We would rather tell you this than have you discover it and assume the download is
broken. A certificate is coming.

What is free

Protect is free for everyone, permanently. It redacts personal data out of what
you copy, on your machine, before it can reach an LLM or anywhere else. No key, no
account, no expiry, and no clock starts when you install it.

Everything else, file redaction, the reversible vault and the Accuracy tier, runs
on a 15 day trial you start when you want it.

Known in this beta

• Not code signed, so SmartScreen fires on first run.
• The light installer cannot obtain the Accuracy tier.
• Installing one variant over the other merges rather than replaces.
• There is no way to buy a licence yet. If your trial runs out and you want to
  keep going, please open an issue and we will sort you out.

Nothing here phones home. There is no telemetry, no analytics endpoint, and no
crash reporting. Found something wrong? Please open an issue.

Omit Redact 1.0.0 beta 11

Eleventh beta of Omit Redact. Fully offline PII detection and redaction for Windows.

What changed since beta.10

Every redaction opened a browser tab, whether you wanted to see the report or not. The app already has an Open report button for the moment you actually want it. The engine underneath was also opening one automatically, on every single run, with no way to turn it off. It no longer does. The button is the only way the report opens now.

Pick an installer

	Download	On disk	What you get
Offline	931 MB	1.5 GB	Every language, plus the Accuracy model. Never contacts the network.
Light	167 MB	517 MB	English and the Fast model. Other languages download on demand. Accuracy is not available.

Before you install

These installers are not code signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen will warn you and you will need to choose "More info" and then "Run anyway".

Omit Redact 1.0.0 beta 10

Tenth beta of Omit Redact. Fully offline PII detection and redaction for Windows.

What changed since beta.9

A document with no images in it could get refused outright, or have most of its pages turned into pictures. The message named the reason, VERIFICATION_FAILED, but not the cause, and the pages-became-an-image note made it look like the app had mistaken plain text for a scanned page. It had not. Detection scores every occurrence of a value on its own, so the same name, place or number can be confirmed on one page of a document and missed on another, purely from the wording around it. Nothing carried a confirmed value to its own exact twin elsewhere in the file, so the untouched twin survived redaction, the app's own leak check found it, and it did the right thing: it refused to write a file it could not vouch for, rather than quietly ship one with a value still in it.

A value confirmed once is now carried to every place in the document where it appears unchanged, before redaction runs, so the review screen shows the full picture rather than the redaction step tripping over a gap review never saw.

On the document this was first reported against, this closed roughly seven in ten of the leftover spans that used to force a refusal. It does not close all of them. A short, generic string, two to four characters, can legitimately appear elsewhere in a document for reasons that have nothing to do with the original detection, and reaching for those too would start blacking out ordinary text that was never PII. That trade was left as is, on purpose: a refusal costs you a re-run, ordinary text redacted by mistake costs you the document.

Pick an installer

	Download	On disk	What you get
Offline	931 MB	1.5 GB	Every language, plus the Accuracy model. Never contacts the network.
Light	167 MB	517 MB	English and the Fast model. Other languages download on demand. Accuracy is not available.

Before you install

These installers are not code signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen will warn you and you will need to choose "More info" and then "Run anyway".