ScotRedact Redaction Tool

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Overview

Intended purpose

Overview — ScotRedact uses AI to identify and redact personally identifiable information (PII) from official documents due for release, improving accuracy and reducing manual effort. It combines generative AI to identify PII with robotic process automation to remove the appropriate information from a copy of the document.

How it is used — The process extracts PII from a document's text and passes it to users for validation. Once validated, it redacts the PII and uploads both a ""marked-up"" and a ""redacted"" version of the document to the document record system. Testing was undertaken to improve and validate the outputs.

Human oversight — A human must always review and approve the final output. The user identifies the documents requiring redaction, reviews the document and any identified PII and is responsible for the final decision on what should and should not be redacted, and reviews the redacted document before it is shared or published. This mandatory human-in-the-loop step ensures the accuracy and appropriateness of redactions.

Benefits

  • Standardises PII redaction and reduces the time it takes for users to identify and redact PII from documents, releasing more time for the elements of the response that require more careful thought and judgement.
  • Improves response times for releasing information.
  • Increases the number of documents that can be pro-actively published.

Use of individuals' personal data

Using individuals personal data

Decision making using personal data

Does not make decisions using personal data

Datasets

FOI Data

Owner and responsibility

Contact address
Andy McClintock
Contact email
ai@gov.scot