How to redact a chat export
Exported chats end up in court bundles, HR complaints, research datasets and support tickets. They name everyone in the conversation, and the messages themselves are full of phone numbers, addresses and links. The text redaction tool works through the export and keeps one message per line.
Getting the export
- WhatsApp: open the chat, choose Export chat from the menu and pick Without media. You get a .txt file, sometimes inside a .zip that needs unzipping first.
- Telegram Desktop: Export chat history, with the format set to machine-readable JSON.
- Slack: a workspace export is a folder of JSON files, one per channel per day. Open the days you need.
Steps
- Open the .txt or .json file, or paste the part of the chat you need.
- Allow the scan. Names, phone numbers, emails, addresses and links are found in the messages and in the sender names at the start of each line.
- Add nicknames under "Always redact". People rarely use full names in a chat, so first names and nicknames may need listing by hand.
- Pick a style. "Replace with label" turns every person into [NAME]. If the reader has to tell people apart, swap each name for a stand-in such as "Person A" with find and replace in a text editor before opening the file, and let the scan catch the rest.
- Download the redacted file.
Easy to miss
- Phone numbers shown in place of names for people who are not in your contacts.
- Group names and "added" or "left" system lines.
- Shared locations, which appear as map links with coordinates.
- Usernames, @mentions and email signatures pasted into messages.
Photos and voice notes are not part of a text export. If you need them, redact each one in the image or audio tool.