🛡️ Redactify – Data Minimization Scanner

Redactify is a local Flask-based web application that scans .txt and .csv files for sensitive information and redacts it using a combination of regular expressions and NLP (spaCy). It helps organizations minimize data exposure by only retaining essential information.

🧠 Example Use Case: Hospitals or clinics can use Redactify to remove patient-identifiable data from medical records before sharing them for research or AI model training.

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✨ Features

• 🔍 Detects and redacts:

  • Names, organizations, locations, and dates using spaCy's NER
  • Emails, phone numbers, usernames, and formatted dates using regex

• 📄 Supports .txt and .csv files

• ⚡ Instant download of redacted file

• 🎨 Aesthetic and professional UI with drag-and-drop + file picker

• 📦 Comes with pre-configured virtual environment (env/)

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📂 Folder Structure

Redactify/
├── app.py
├── redactor.py
├── uploads/                # Uploaded and redacted files
├── templates/
│   └── index.html
├── static/
│   └── style.css
├── env/                   # Virtual environment (already configured)
├── README.md

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🚀 How to Run Locally

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/redactify.git
   cd redactify

2. Activate the virtual environment

   # Windows
   env\Scripts\activate
   
   # macOS/Linux
   source env/bin/activate

3. Run the Flask server

   python app.py

4. Open your browser and go to http://localhost:5000

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⚙️ Dependencies (Preinstalled in env/)

• Flask
• spaCy (en_core_web_sm)
• pandas
• re (built-in)

To download the spaCy model again (if needed):

python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

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🧠 Learning Goals

This project was built not just to demonstrate utility but also to:

• Practice secure file handling
• Learn NLP-based entity recognition
• Implement privacy-aware design thinking
• Understand regex and named entity offsets

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📌 Future Scope

• This is a basic version of Redactify.

• Future versions may support:

  • Image-based redaction using OCR
  • Docx and PDF file types
  • Scan summary reports (entities redacted, counts, etc.)
  • Integration with cloud storage (optional)

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👨‍💻 Created By

Parantap Mishra GitHub · LinkedIn