BlurDataIn 2024, every "redact a PDF on Mac" tutorial ended the same way: open Preview, zoom in, drag a black rectangle. For images, the advice was even worse: paste into Pixelmator, use the brush tool, hope you got every email. Adobe Acrobat Pro could search for a few fixed patterns, like phone and card numbers, for $20 a month. I couldn't find a Mac app that found names and addresses on its own without uploading the file.
I needed something else. I was sharing dozens of screenshots a week — terminal output, billing dashboards, support tickets — and every time I had to either hand-edit each one or post a slightly leaked version and hope nobody noticed. So I built the tool I wanted.
A native macOS app. On-device. Drag, detect, done.
The first version
The first version of BlurData did one thing: drop a PNG, get back a PNG with every email and URL blurred out. It used on-device text recognition and a handful of patterns. No cloud, no AI API, no account. Released as a paid Mac app in 2024, focused on automatic PII redaction native to macOS.
Then it grew
Users asked for names. So I added on-device name detection. They asked for IPs, account numbers, license plates. Each one was a new detector. They asked for PDFs — so PDF support landed, with true redaction (text removed from the file structure, not a sticker on top). Then batch mode, custom regex patterns, custom redaction styles.
Today, anyone searching "auto redact Mac" will find several apps that look similar, and new ones keep arriving. That is fine: it means the problem is real. BlurData keeps doing what it did from the first version: find the data for you, on your Mac, and never upload the file.
Why this matters
It matters because this is what indie Mac software looks like in 2026. A single person sees a problem, ships a tool, and keeps caring about every detail: the OCR accuracy on small fonts, the way Italian addresses match differently from US ones, whether the export keeps the PDF table of contents intact.
It also matters because privacy software should be made by people you can email. BlurData is one person. Your PDFs never leave your Mac because there is no server to send them to. There is no investor demanding telemetry. If you write to support, you get an answer from the person who wrote the code.
What's next
The latest builds added Pseudonymize, which swaps names and numbers for consistent labels like [PERSON_1] so a document can go to an AI without the people in it, and Save as Markdown (for AI), a clean text version with the same labels. Next: more languages in the address and name detectors, a Mac Shortcuts action so you can wire BlurData into your own automations, better defaults so you spend even less time clicking. And — always — keeping everything on your Mac, where it belongs.
If you've ever pasted a screenshot and immediately regretted it, BlurData is for you. Get BlurData for Mac.
— iyia, maker of BlurData