What is Data Masking in Documents?
Data masking means replace some data with dummy data. For example if you have a Word or PDF document with confidential information like your name, address, bank account, financial information etc. With data masking, you can replace these confidential data with dummy or random data. This way you can share the file with anyone, they can make use of the file, but instead of your personal information, they will only see masked/random data.
How to Mask Data in Word Document using AI?
The Mask Word document app uses the latest OpenAI APIs to mask data in your files. You can upload the Word document that may have personal information, the AI Masking app will try to detect the personal information and replace such data with dummy characters like xxxxxxx. The process is very easy it takes few seconds to do the masking. After replacing such sensitive data with dummy data, the link of new file will be right in front of you. You can download the replaced file and save it in your computer.
Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-with-red-light-on-face-5473950/
This app can be useful in sharing the following types of files.
- Employment contracts
- Financial agreements between companies
- Personal documents like resume
- Health documents and reports
The app is not perfect. There is also no guarantee that it will remove all the sensitive information from the document. You have to review it yourself as well. The AI will get trained with the passage of time and get more accurate in determining what is confidential and what is not.
In the first release, we just remove specific data like name, address, phone number, credit cards and id numbers. In future, we will also add more options so that you can specify what kind of data is sensitive, so that masking process is more accurate.
Steps to Mask Confidential Data
Open https://products.fileformat.ai/word-processing/mask/ in browser. All fileformat.ai apps work with the latest version of modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge etc.
Upload your Word document that contains some confidential information. In my case I will upload a very basic Word document, click here to view. It contains my name, address, id, credit card numbers as shown in the screenshot below.
After uploading the file, click on the Mask button. It will take few seconds to process the document. The Mask data app uses Open AI APIs to detect the confidential data and will replace all such data with the dummy characters.
When the process is complete, you will see the “Download” button. Click on it and the updated file with the dummy data will be downloaded to your computer.
Save the file and open it in Microsoft Word or any open source software to view DOCX files. You will see that it has successfully replaced the sensitive data with xxxxx characters. Click here to view the updated file.
A screenshot of the masked document is also shown below for your reference.
