How to remove personal details before uploading

Your name, date of birth and record number are not needed to explain your results. Removing them before uploading is the simplest way to keep them out of any system, including ours.

On a paper report, cover the header with a sheet of paper and photograph the rest of the page. On a PDF, crop the header or black it out before uploading — most PDF viewers can do this, though check that the redaction removes the text rather than drawing a box over it.

Where we detect a name, date of birth or record number in the extracted text, it is removed before anything is sent to an external service, and you can remove it yourself during the checking step. Treat that as a safety net rather than the first line of defence, because automatic detection is never complete.

If your report is a PDF generated by your laboratory, the values are read entirely in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere at all. Redacting still costs you nothing and protects against the file being read on a shared computer later.