Personal Info Scrubber — Help

You copy some text. You double-click the tool. It looks at the text on your clipboard, replaces anything that looks like personal information with a label such as [EMAIL-REDACTED], and puts the cleaned text back on your clipboard. Then you paste as normal.

The point is to let you share a log file, an error message, or a support ticket without handing over someone's personal details along with it.

You pick which of these to use before you download, and you can add a pattern of your own for things like account numbers or employee IDs.

1. On the main page, tick the categories you want and click Download Personal Info Scrubber. A file named PersonalInfoScrubber.cmd saves to your Downloads folder.
2. Copy the text you want to clean (select it and press Ctrl+C).
3. Open your Downloads folder and double-click PersonalInfoScrubber.cmd.
4. A small summary appears telling you what was removed. Paste anywhere you like — your clipboard now holds the cleaned version.

This is normal and expected. Windows shows it for any free file that has not paid for a digital certificate. It is a caution, not a virus warning.

1. Click More info in the blue box.
2. Click Run anyway.

Still nervous?

Right-click the file, choose Edit (or open it in Notepad), and read it. It is plain text. It reads your clipboard, does some find-and-replace, and writes your clipboard back. It has no code in it that contacts the internet.

The tool works on text. Copying a file in File Explorer, or copying a picture, does not put text on the clipboard.

Open the file, select the text inside it, press Ctrl+C, and run the tool again.

A few things genuinely look identical to personal data:

• A version number like 1.2.3.4 is indistinguishable from an IP address, so it gets removed. Longer ones like 10.0.22631.4317 are left alone.
• A long reference number that happens to pass the credit-card checksum will be treated as a card.

If this gets in your way, untick that category on the download page and download the tool again. It errs toward removing too much rather than too little, which is the safer mistake for a privacy tool to make.

The built-in patterns cover the common cases in US-style formatting. Names, street addresses, and non-US phone formats are not detected.

For anything specific to your workplace — account numbers, ticket IDs, internal server names — tick Also remove my own pattern on the download page and enter a pattern. Use the live preview on that page to confirm it catches what you expect before you download.

Always read the cleaned text before you share it. This tool is a strong first pass, not a guarantee.

• Look for a small summary window or text file; it may have opened behind your other windows.
• If a black window flashed and closed, the tool ran. Try pasting — your clipboard is probably already cleaned.
• If your workplace computer is locked down by an IT department, it may block the file. That is a policy on your PC, not a problem with the tool.

No. The tool replaces what is on your clipboard. Once the original is gone from the clipboard, this tool cannot bring it back — it never keeps a copy of it anywhere.

If the text came from a file or a message you still have open, it is safest to go back to that and copy it again.

Only if you want to change which categories it removes, or add or edit your own pattern. Those choices are built into the file at the moment you download it, so an existing copy keeps doing exactly what it did before.

Otherwise, keep the file. You can run it as many times as you like. Some people pin it to their taskbar or Start menu so it is one click away.