Offline anonymization software that works on your computer

Offline anonymization: protect before you share

The reasoning fits in two lines. You want to remove personal data from a document to stay in control of who has access to it. Biffer does this removal on your computer, right where the document is: protection exists before anything is shared, and you then decide, with full knowledge, who receives the anonymized version. You remain the only person to have seen the document in the clear.

Local document processing follows a simple logic: the software comes to the document. That is the approach we took with Biffer, and it is what "no cloud" means in our vocabulary: your data, your files and your mapping tables live on your disk, and only there.

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Local processing: what it means in practice

"Offline" deserves a precise definition. Here is what we mean for Biffer, and what you can check for yourself.

• Analysis happens on the computer. Detection of people, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, French company numbers (SIREN and SIRET), French social security numbers, IBANs, license plates, dates and profession-specific fields is run by the installed software, using your computer's resources.
• You process your files anywhere, with or without a network. You can turn off the network, work on a train or on an isolated computer: offline anonymization works the same way.
• Everything stays on the machine. The document, the preview and the mapping table are saved locally, the table encrypted or in plain text as you choose.
• The license is checked on your computer. The first time you open it, the software asks for your email address and, after you click the confirmation link, receives a key tied to that address and to the computer's identifier. That is the only connection, once per computer; the key is then checked locally, and the free plan counter (5 files per month) is kept on your disk.

How it works in detail, from the highlighted preview to rewriting, is described on the features page. Supported formats are PDF, Word, Excel, CSV and text, as well as images and scanned PDFs, read by built-in character recognition; the page redact a PDF explains why this format calls for rewriting in place rather than a black rectangle.

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Professional confidentiality: protect before anything circulates

For a lawyer, a notary, an accountant, a doctor or an HR professional, the question goes beyond compliance: it concerns professional secrecy, whose breach is punished in France by Article 226-13 of the French Criminal Code. Anonymizing a client file on your own computer keeps its content within the circle of people bound by secrecy, starting with you, before it circulates at all.

Confidential processing therefore rests on a simple rule: the document only circulates once it is protected. Offline software lets you follow this rule without changing your habits. The file stays in the case folder, the anonymized version is produced next to it, and only that version can be submitted to an AI assistant, sent to a colleague or attached to an exchange. The page anonymize before ChatGPT describes the actual round trip with an online assistant.

For these professions, Biffer includes lists of preset fields (lawyers' bar locker (toque) and court case (RG) numbers, CRPCEN notary staff number, RPPS and ADELI health professional numbers, training provider number NDA, claim and policy numbers, employee ID), described page by page in the professions section. Romain Rissoan, a trainer and consultant based in Lyon, France, built them from the documents these professions actually handle.

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GDPR processors: the Article 28 step you can skip

As soon as a provider processes personal data on your behalf, the GDPR makes it a processor, and its Article 28 requires a written contract setting out the subject matter, duration and nature of the processing, the security obligations and what happens to the data at the end of the service. This framework applies as soon as your data is processed by an outside party: you then have to check its guarantees, sign a contract and record it in your register of processing activities.

With a local solution, you skip this step for the anonymization itself. The software runs on your hardware, under your control: you are the only recipient of your documents, and your files stay with you. You keep your responsibilities as data controller (security of the computer, review of the result, choice of the AI tool to which you then submit the anonymized document), and you gain a shorter chain: one contract, one risk and one register entry fewer.

It is also an answer to Article 25 of the regulation, which calls for data protection by design: a solution that runs on the computer reduces, by construction, the number of systems where the data exists. The regulatory context of AI assistants is covered on the page personal data and AI.

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Offline, local, on-premises: what are we talking about?

The terms overlap without being synonyms. The table below places Biffer among the architectures you come across for document anonymization.

For an organization of a few people, a firm or a department, the last row is the simplest to set up: software to install, one license per person, and data that stays on the computer. Several licenses can be bought at once and assigned to colleagues from an account; the price (€10 excl. VAT (€12 incl. VAT) per computer, paid once, for the lifetime of the version) is shown on the pricing page. The download for Mac and PC (Windows) is available on the download page.

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