Redaction Settings

3 min read

Nutshell AI can automatically strip sensitive fields from a summary before it is written back into the SharePoint stub. Toggles live on the File Processing & Security page in the Squirrel admin portal.

Redaction happens during summary generation, so redacted values never reach the SharePoint index. When Copilot or SharePoint Search later reads the stub, it sees the redacted summary — the sensitive content was never written in the first place.

The four redaction categories

Personal names — removes individual names and signatures. Useful when summaries would otherwise carry the names of employees, customers, or third parties in a way that broadens who can find them via search.
Financial amounts — removes money values and account numbers. Useful for contracts, invoices, and financial reports where the numeric detail is sensitive but the shape of the document (topic, structure, parties involved) is still valuable in a summary.
Contact details — removes phone numbers, email addresses, and other identifiers.
Dates and timestamps — removes date and time references that may reveal sensitive activity (e.g. project timelines, contract execution dates, incident schedules).

Each toggle is independent. Turning on Personal names alone strips names while keeping financial and date content intact.

When to use each toggle

Personal names — high-value for HR documents, medical records, legal case files, and anywhere a plaintext name in the search index would be a privacy concern.
Financial amounts — high-value for contracts, invoices, board packs, and M&A documents.
Contact details — high-value for CRM exports, customer records, and anything that would otherwise put PII into the search index.
Dates and timestamps — high-value for incident reports, investigation records, or scheduled activity where the timing is the sensitive part.

The right combination depends on your compliance regime and search scope. For tenants where SharePoint Search results are visible broadly across the organisation, more aggressive redaction reduces incidental exposure. For tenants where archived documents are only searchable by a small controlled audience, redaction can often be minimal.

How redaction affects summary quality

Redaction is applied intelligently — Nutshell removes the sensitive value while preserving the surrounding structure and meaning. A summary of a contract with financial amounts redacted might read "the parties agreed to a settlement of [redacted amount] payable in [redacted date] instalments" rather than dropping the concept of the amount entirely.

The trade-off is that heavily redacted summaries are less specific — which is exactly the point. If you need the specifics, you restore the original document from the stub.

Turning redaction on for an existing tenant

Redaction toggles apply to future summary writes only. To have redaction applied to previously summarised archives, use retrospective summarisation to re-queue those archives after the toggle change. Older summaries in the stubs are then replaced with the redacted versions on the next processing pass.