How-to
How to check a document for personal information before you share it
Check in three passes. First search for obvious patterns: names, emails, phone numbers, dates and ID numbers. Then check the places searches miss: headers, footers, tables, comments, tracked changes, file properties and scanned pages. Finally read the whole document for facts that identify someone indirectly, such as a rare job title or a small town.
Last reviewed · 2 sources
Pass 1: patterns you can search for
Search for the formats personal details usually take:
- Names of every person and organisation involved
- “@” for email addresses, and phone number formats
- Dates, especially birth dates
- Government and account numbers: SIN or SSN, passport, licence, policy, case and card numbers
- Street addresses and postal or ZIP codes
Pass 2: places searches miss
Word documents can hide personal details in comments, tracked changes, headers and footers, and file properties such as the author. PDFs can carry form field values, annotations and attachments. Scanned pages contain no searchable text at all until they have been through OCR.
Open each of these deliberately. A document that looks clean on screen can still carry a reviewer’s name in its metadata.
Pass 3: indirect identifiers
Read the full document for facts that point to one person without naming them: an unusual job, a specific incident, a small community. The Law Society of Ontario warns that someone “may be able to piece together information from the anonymized facts provided.”
Decide what the recipient needs. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s generative AI principles ask organisations to limit disclosure “to only what is needed” for the purpose.
Where PiBye fits
How PiBye handles this
PiBye runs the first pass for you on your Mac: it detects names, contact details, dates and more than twenty kinds of identifiers in PDFs, scans, Word files and text, and lists every finding for review.
It then shows the complete approved copy, so the second and third passes happen on the exact text you will share.
1.0.1 · macOS 14.8.5 or later · Apple Silicon · 1.1 GB
Frequently asked questions
Can software find all personal information automatically?
No. Detection tools miss things, especially in scans and unusual formats. Use them to speed up the review, not replace it.
What about photos and signatures?
Images, signatures and handwriting often contain identifying details that text search cannot find. Check them by eye.
What about tracked changes and comments in Word?
Resolve tracked changes and delete comments before sharing. They can contain reviewers’ names and earlier wording that the final text no longer shows.
Sources
- Licensee use of generative artificial intelligence (white paper), Law Society of Ontario, April 2024. Checked 17 September 2026.
- Principles for responsible, trustworthy and privacy-protective generative AI technologies, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, December 7, 2023. Checked 17 September 2026.