Keep Your Documents Safe: Best Practices

A scanned passport is more dangerous than the physical one, because a copy can be in a hundred places at once and you will never know. Treat the file with the same care as the document.

Know where processing happens

Many online converters upload your file to a server, process it there and promise to delete it later. That promise may well be kept, but it is still a copy on someone else's disk. Tools that run in the browser never send the file at all — worth checking before you hand over anything sensitive.

Redact properly

Drawing a black box over a number in an image editor and saving as PDF hides it visually while leaving the text underneath, where anyone can select and copy it. Remove the content, then flatten the page to an image, then check by trying to select the text.

Password-protect what you send

Email is a series of hops between servers. Encrypt the attachment and send the password by a different channel, such as a text message. A password in the same email as the file protects nothing.

Prune your camera roll

Photos of ID documents linger in cloud backups for years. Once the scan is filed, delete the original photo from the phone and from the deleted items folder.

Strip metadata when it matters

A PDF can carry the author name, the software used and the creation date. Rarely a problem, occasionally revealing. Check the document properties before publishing something publicly.