Xerox's 'Intelligent Redaction' Scanners

coondoggie writes "Xerox today touted software it says can scan documents, understand their meaning and block access to those sensitive or secure areas so that prying eyes cannot read, copy or forward the information. Xerox and researchers from its Palo Alto Research Center debuted "Intelligent Redaction," new software that automates the process of removing confidential information from any document. The software includes a detection tool that uses content analysis and an intelligent user interface to protect sensitive information. It can encrypt only the sensitive sections or paragraphs of a document, a capability previously not available, Xerox said."

User Manual = Redacted

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonderful, I wonder what the scanner does to the 'redacted' material?

Maybe it's as good as Adobe PDF's redaction feature, and anyone can unredact the document?

Or maybe it sends the redacted portion to any one of the 3-letter agencys, that 'don't exist'.

Automatically redacts the same content...

[aicrules]

So, once you have marked a certain confidential information as confidential, it will do it automatically in other documents. Which means that for the low, low price of your time, you can submit a document with "fill-in the blanks" text until it redacts the same parts and BANG you know what the redacted section was...:D

Details please.

[starseeker]

Obviously this is not possible in general, since how sensitive information is can and will change over time. Without full AI awareness of the situation that places the document in context, this is not possible. (E.g. the statement "Bob will be leaving the company" could either be highly sensitive or old news, depending entirely on the time and/or reader. Even more fun, what about "accidentally" sensitive statements where the mere fact that the machine hides it flags it as an item of interest to someone who didn't know it was interesting?)

Also, a machine may "blank out" the sensitive part but leave enough around it for an astute hostile actor to still gain something - such things are so highly context sensitive I can't see any general algorithm that could guarantee success in all such cases.

Still, two possibly useful approaches that are closer to hand would be:

1) Supply the machine with a form, and specify certain areas (which will contain an SSN, for example) as containing information that must be treated as sensitive. So long as a standard form is used, the results could be handy.

2) Supply the machine with a complete list of information you want to keep under wraps (and all the various ways that information might appear - drawings, descriptions, what have you) and have it check each document for anything that matches anything on its sensitive list. This also has problems and would be easy to get around but it WOULD be helpful to prevent non-hostile carelessness - i.e. "WHOOPS Bob just scanned something sensitive to add to that email, better blot out the parts that aren't cleared to go outside the organization."

While a general solution isn't possible, I can actually see this being useful in controlled situations. The article mentions medical, financial and government which all have lots of well defined forms that can be used. It won't allow the replacement of human judgement but it might make it easier to stop certain forms of accidental distribution in well defined cases, and that's worth pursuing so long as it doesn't encourage carelessness.

Maybe it's a good idea.

[DanielJosphXhan]

If the intelligent redaction feature accidentally misses actual critical information and instead redacts non-critical information, that could be a good thing. I mean, for people who want to know things other people don't want them to know.

Next step?

[fropenn]

What is the next step in development of this feature? What about using it to prevent the duplication of copyrighted works (sort of a DRM for paper)?

Re:Disaster in the making

[Raul654]

On the contrary, I'm do computer engineering research for a living. And don't get me wrong - I think this is a perfectly valid area to research. But a redacting copier is 3 (or more) decades from being a viable product - the technology just isn't there yet. Wildly exaggerated claims leading to disappointment have plagued the AI field for decades, and putting out products like this only contributes to that.

Re:Automatically redacts the same content...

[Brad Eleven]

The best part is your use of revenant. Had to look it up [reference.com]: One who returns after death (as a ghost) or after a long absence. Other sources say animated corpse.

Kind of like our guarantees of freedoms, any more: Ghosts, or zombies at best, but possibly resurrected in toto at some future date.