Download AppSECTION 01
When you're asked for an ID photo
Landlords, visa agencies, HR onboarding, marketplace verification, age checks — requests for ID photos are routine now. The safe habit is to share the minimum: redact every field the specific recipient doesn't need, and keep a note of who received what.
- Rental applications — usually only your name and photo need to stay visible
- Marketplace or platform verification — check which fields their policy actually requires
- Sending documents to family or an agent over chat apps
- Posting a document online to ask a question about it
SECTION 02
What to redact on an ID card
- Document / license number — the most abused field
- Date of birth and address, unless explicitly required
- Machine-readable zone (the two or three lines of characters on passports)
- Barcodes and QR codes — they often encode everything printed on the card
- Signature
SECTION 03
Why light blur isn't enough for numbers
Researchers have repeatedly shown that lightly blurred or pixelated text and codes can be reconstructed, because the smear still carries information about the characters underneath. That's fine for a name you'd merely prefer to de-emphasize — it is not fine for a passport number.
Blur ID's solid and immersive redaction styles remove the content completely, and the exported image is re-rendered with the redaction baked in, so the original pixels are simply absent from the file you share.
SECTION 04
Never upload an ID to an online blur tool
The biggest risk in redacting an ID is the tool itself. Free web-based blur tools often process images server-side — meaning you uploaded a clean scan of your passport to an unknown server in order to hide it from someone else.
Blur ID runs its AI entirely on your iPhone. The app works in airplane mode, collects no images, and your document never leaves the device. For identity documents, on-device processing isn't a nice-to-have — it's the whole point.