What happens if Cover misses something?
The editor opens after every run so you can spot-check each page. If anything got past the engine, click the word and it's gone.
If something was over-redacted, click again to bring it back.
That combination is the whole workflow: Cover handles the bulk, you handle the last bit. The editor is built around making the last bit feel like one click.
Can a redaction be undone?
Yes, if you have the original, unredacted PDF. Inside the editor everything is reversible until you save: click a redaction to remove it, undo any time. And you can always open the original again later, adjust what's covered, and save a fresh copy.
For anyone you send the redacted file to: no. Redactions are permanent. The saved PDF has the original characters physically removed. There's nothing under the ink to recover. That's the point.
What kinds of information does Cover find?
- People: names, signatures (drawn or scanned), dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, home and mailing addresses.
- Government IDs: Social Security numbers (even pre-masked ones), ITIN and EIN tax IDs, driver's license numbers, and national IDs from outside the US: UK National Insurance, France NIR, India PAN, Italy Codice Fiscale, Mexico RFC & CURP.
- Money & accounts: bank account and routing numbers (including international IBANs), credit and debit card numbers.
- Labeled numbers: insurance and medical IDs (policy, member, Medicare, medical-record), plus invoice, loan, employee, case, docket, and claim numbers.
- Vehicles: VINs.
You always get the final say. Every match shows up in the editor to confirm, and anything it didn't catch is one click to redact.
What about scans or photos of documents?
Scanned or photographed pages work like any other PDF: Cover reads the text inside them with OCR, then redacts what it finds.
Photos are different. Cover doesn't wrap a redaction around an image the way it does around text, but you can still cover one. Click any white space to place a redaction, hold ⌘ Command and drag it over the image, then pull the corners to resize it until it's covered.
What actually happens to the personal info inside the file?
It's removed. The sensitive characters come out of the document and the empty space gets filled with solid ink. We also clean hidden material a lot of people don't know is in there: form-field entries, document properties, edit history.
This matters because some redaction tools just draw a black rectangle on top of the original text. If you copy-paste from one of those PDFs, the redacted text comes back. With Cover, there's nothing underneath to recover.
Is this really all local?
The redaction is, yes. Turn off Wi-Fi and redact a file: everything runs on your Mac, and the finished PDF never touches a server. No accounts, no upload step.
When your Mac is online, the app makes two small housekeeping calls: it checks for updates, and if it crashes it sends an anonymous crash report so we can fix the bug. Neither carries your documents or anything from them, and both can be turned off in Settings.
The full story, in plain English: privacy policy.
Does Cover collect anything about me?
Cover has no accounts, no in-app analytics, and no usage tracking. The app doesn't know who you are and we don't either. If the app crashes, it sends an anonymous crash report (app version, macOS version, and where the code failed), never your documents or anything from them. You can turn this off in Settings.
This site uses privacy-respecting analytics for page-load counts only. No cookies, no cross-site tracking.
Your documents themselves are processed on your Mac and are not transmitted to us, so we never receive their contents. Any future feature that shared document data with us would be strictly opt-in, with its own terms shown before you enroll. The full policy, in plain English: privacy policy.
Will this pass an IT, legal, or compliance review?
Cover is designed to map to the standards reviewers typically check. The same set of behaviors covers corporate, legal, and government use.
Two behaviors reviewers tend to care about most. First, every save is self-verified: Cover re-reads the finished file and confirms the removed text is byte-absent, including compressed data and leftover file history, or it refuses to save. Second, every save can include a redaction certificate and log, a page-by-page record of what was removed and which checks the file passed.
- NSA/CSS PDF redaction
- Hidden content and metadata cleared
- Fed. R. Civ. P. 5.2 / 49.1
- Helps filers meet court personal-identifier redaction rules
- HIPAA Safe Harbor (45 CFR §164.514)
- Safe Harbor identifier categories covered
- PCI-DSS Requirement 3
- Card numbers fully redacted
- GDPR Arts. 4, 28, 44–49
- Redacted output, processed fully on-device; no third-party processor involved
- NIST SP 800-171 / CMMC Level 2
- Document processing fully on-device; no document data egress
- NARA FOIA processing
- OCR runs on scans before redaction
- EDRM / Sedona
- Redaction certificate and per-run log, on the Enterprise tier
- SOC 2
- Designed to support your organization's confidentiality controls (CC6.1 / C1.2)
What it detects & removes: the full identifier list under “What kinds of information does Cover find?” above, from names and Social Security numbers through non-US national IDs, signatures, and case numbers.
True removal, not masking: redacted characters are deleted from the page content, not covered; hidden form-field values, document properties, and metadata are cleared; scans are redacted inside the image itself; and every file is re-extracted and byte-scanned before it's written. A file that fails verification is rejected rather than saved.
Not in scope: per-redaction FOIA exemption codes, and native e-discovery load files (Relativity, Concordance).
The same material, in handout form, lives in the Read Me's "For your IT, legal, or compliance team" section, and the verification chain is summarized on the security page.
What kinds of documents does it handle?
Everyday personal and business paperwork: tax forms and full returns, bank and brokerage statements, medical bills and explanations of benefits, legal letters, insurance correspondence, leases, mortgage and closing packages, and government or immigration forms like the I-485.
There's no page limit. A 200-page tax return or a 400-page closing package redacts the same way a 2-page bill does. A longer document just takes longer, scaling with your Mac.
Will this work on Windows or Linux?
Mac only right now. We'd rather make it great on one platform than spread thin across three.
How does the free trial work?
Download Cover free, run it on your real PDFs, end to end including save. The output is watermarked and there's a small daily cap on how many PDFs you can process. That's enough to prove the engine works on your documents, not just on a demo file.
When you decide to buy, one purchase removes the watermarks from every PDF you have already saved, automatically. The cap lifts. You don't have to re-run anything.