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Is there a way to digitally markup a pdf so its not OCR-readable? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Want to ensure financial documents cant be parsed by automated systems

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

This works, right up until you introduce PDF compatible software that doesn't give a shit about your rules, of which there's plenty.

You can also print/scan, or even print to PDF to get around such limitations. The original document cannot be altered since that would invalidate the digital signature on the file, but you can create a perfect digital copy, omitting the signature, and modify it however you want.

If online systems that are skimming documents for their contents don't give a shit about what the signature is, and simply take a copy and OCR it to train an AI or amalgamate the information for data harvesting or other purposes.

I get what you're saying and in concept, it should be fine, the problem is that it's a software lock/restriction on a file type that isn't inherently closed source, unknown, nor was the PDF format built to be secure from the ground up. So we're applying security to a system that wasn't built for it.