The long answers to the questions this product exists for.

What do I redact in a DSAR, and what stays?

22 Sep 2026

The data subject's own data stays, even inside somebody else's sentence. Other people's identifying details are weighed item by item, and usually come out. Article 15(4) protects their rights and is not, as a rule, a ground to withhold the document.

Start here if the request is in front of you and the question is what to take out. The guide sets out the rule, which is narrower than most people expect, then what stays in, what comes out, and how to decide it once per person rather than once per document, with the article and the decision behind each step. It is the guide the other two are special cases of, and the one to read if you read one page on this site before answering a request.

How do I redact an employee access request?

19 Sep 2026

An employee request is the hard instance: the requester knows everybody in the files, the material is correspondence rather than records, and the same colleagues recur across hundreds of documents.

An employee's request is the expensive instance, and this guide says why before it says what to do: the requester knows everyone in the documents, the material is correspondence rather than records, and the same colleagues recur across hundreds of files. It covers the scoping question that comes before any redaction, whose personal data is whose in a workplace file, the steps that keep a large case consistent, and the parts that stay hard whatever tool you use.

Does redacting a PDF remove the text?

19 Sep 2026

A drawn box is a graphic, not a deletion. What survives it, how to check a file you have already sent, and the only approach that removes the risk rather than reducing it.

The narrowest question here and the one most often answered wrong. A box drawn over a name in a PDF changes what a reader sees and not always what the file holds, and this guide lists the eight places text survives an in-place edit, from the text layer to the attachment nobody opened. It ends with the seven checks you can run on a file you have already sent, in the software you already have, which the Desk also carries as a checklist you can tick.

What does it cost to redact a DSAR?

28 Sep 2026

The two costs of answering an access request, the hours of review and the pages of the bundle, what a billable page actually is, and how to estimate a case before you commit to it.

Unlike everything else in this room, this is not a question about the law. Answering an access request costs hours of somebody reading, and it costs whatever the tooling charges, and the two are counted completely differently. This sets out what a billable page actually is, the three rules that account for nearly all of the difference between what people expect and what a case counts, and five steps you can run over a folder before you upload anything. It states no market rate for review, because there is no honest single figure for one, and it says which half of any estimate is yours.