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

submitted 2 weeks ago by cheese_greater@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

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Want to ensure financial documents cant be parsed by automated systems

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[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 weeks ago

I would OCR it myself, but edit the meta data in the file so that the text in the OCR metadata is lorem ipsum.

So any bots that assume that the OCR text is what's on the image in the PDF (and why wouldn't they), it will only read useless junk. Only someone reading the text from the image would "see" it, and only a bot programmed to OCR a file that already has OCR metadata would realize that there's any inconsistency.

I'm not entirely sure how to accomplish that, but I'd figure it out if I was worried about the data being compromised.

Personally, I would simply keep the file in an encrypted container, then I wouldn't worry about what can scan the file since it would be entirely unreadable ciphertext without the correct security key or passphrase.