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Overview
No automated detection catches everything, ours included. Unusual formats, nicknames, low-quality scans: occasionally something slips through. Conseal is built for that moment. Anything the scan missed, you can mark yourself, and it becomes a first-class redaction just like the AI's own detections.
There are two ways to mark a miss, and they end in the same place.
Select it with the cursor
If the missed information is selectable text, just select it, the way you'd select text anywhere. A small popup appears with everything you need to classify and redact it.
Draw a box with the pen tool
For scanned pages, stamps, handwriting, or anything you can't select as text, switch to the pen tool in the toolbar (or press D for Draw redaction box) and drag a box over the area. The same popup appears.
The popup: three ways to classify what you found
However you marked it, Conseal asks one question: what is this? Three tabs give you three answers.
Type. Pick the category: PERSON, ORGANIZATION, LOCATION, EMAIL, PHONE NUMBER, SSN, CREDIT CARD, DATE OF BIRTH, ADDRESS, or leave it as MANUAL if none fit. Use this when the miss is something new that belongs to a standard category.
Existing. This one matters most, and it's easy to overlook. If what you selected is another occurrence of something already detected, attach it to that entity instead of creating a new one. Say the scan caught Dwight Kurt Schrute but missed a lone "Mr. Schrute" later in the document: pick the existing Dwight entry from the list, and the new selection joins it. Same label in the output, same checkbox in the panel, restored together as one identity.
Why it matters: if you classify a repeat mention as a brand-new item instead, the output shows two different labels for the same person, and a careful reader can start inferring connections you meant to hide. Consistent labels are part of the protection.
The classify popup — Existing tab
Custom. Type your own label, like INTERNAL_ID, for information specific to your organization that no standard category describes. Your label appears in the redacted output exactly as you wrote it.
Pick your tab, click Redact, and the item joins the PII Detected panel alongside everything the AI found: same checkboxes, same review flow, same restorability.
The habit that makes this work
Manual marking is only useful if you spot the misses, so pair it with a quick sweep. Documents with names tend to repeat them in shortened forms: a Dwight Kurt Schrute on page one often becomes Mr. Schrute, D. Schrute, or just Dwight later. Use Find in document to search for surname fragments and initials before you redact; every hit the panel doesn't already show is a candidate for the cursor or the pen.
Scanned documents deserve extra suspicion, since detection quality follows scan quality. There's a full guide on getting the best results from scans How to redact scanned documents and images.
The AI does the heavy lifting. These tools exist so that the last word is always yours.