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Case Studies

Supporting a major grocery retailer to quickly redact complex, high-volume cases

Picture showing a document with words redacted.

Facit was already working with this retailer on its video redaction requirements. As a result of its success, the retailer began using our document redaction software.

Posted in: Retail

The retailer wanted to change its processes to reduce the risk when redacting documents as a result of GDPR and the increase in subject access requests (SARs). The software it had been using was could not redact Excel, and struggled with PDFs.

It was a challenging task for the retailer when an employee made a SAR. With more than 330,000 employees and some working for the retailer for tens of years, there could be a lot of information which an operator would need to review before being able to complete the SAR within one month.

Data would include all personnel files, CCTV, emails – which could be into the tens of thousands – and their attachments.

For the retailer, the biggest benefits were the ability to redact Excel spreadsheets – which it has a lot of in its email searches – and the automation. An operator can simply upload all the files and walk away to work on another project whilst the software is redacting.

The good thing is you can upload and we can go off, we don’t have to worry or sit there, we can do something else.
There’s never going to be a way that we can get rid of manual intervention. However, it’s actually massively reduced by using the software, because it’s so accurate that 90% of it is redacted.

Data Protection Officer & CCTV Policy Manager Major Grocery Retailer

Once the software has redacted the selected keywords, an operator can then redact sections of documents or files on a case-by-case basis. The operator can also add comments with reasons for document exclusion to be prepared for follow-up request or potential audits.

The files are then exported as PDFs which are 100% compliant with data privacy laws – there is no hidden meta data or layers that can be reversed to expose private data.

Sometimes we are talking tens of thousands of emails to redact for one DSAR, which is a big challenge and a big task. However, we can simply drop data into Facit’s document redaction software where we can redact by keyword very quickly.

Data Protection Officer & CCTV Policy Manager Major Grocery Retailer