I love it watching when an idea starts, and different writers come up with different solutions and build on the work of others.
It all started on the Technical Difficulties podcast when Gabe Weatherhead and Erik Hess were talking about the documents that they put into Evernote and the documents they do not.
I wrote about it on the blog, and came up with one solution: a way using Hazel to stop documents with sensitive information from being saved to Evernote.
Then Katie Floyd from the Mac Power Users podcast came up with a clever way to use PDFpen to automatically redact sensitive information. This way you can remove the sensitive information from a PDF before saving it to a cloud service.
This is cool, but the script needs to be re-run for each string you want to remove.
Finally, Gabe from Macdrifter (and the aforementioned Technical Difficulties podcast) chimed in with an incredibly clever solution – it takes the idea from Katie’s script but combines it with the ScanSnap’s keyword highlighting feature to automatically redact any highlighted text.
As a bonus, Gabe’s solution has another script to automatically encrypt a PDF using PDFpen.
So clever. Check these posts out if you are a Mac user and want to automate the protection of your sensitive information.
(Photo by Darin Barry)
