I handle 20 to 30 public records requests a month for the Municipal Clerk, and much of that work is reading every page of a response for the details the law keeps out of it. Vendors now sell AI tools that promise to do that reading for you.
What the law keeps out
The Open Public Records Act keeps certain personal details out of what the public receives, among them Social Security numbers, credit and debit card numbers, bank account information, month and day of birth, telephone numbers, driver’s license numbers and a personal email address a public agency required for an application, service or program.1
Under Daniel’s Law, the Act also excludes the portion of any document that discloses the home address of an active, formerly active or retired judicial officer, law enforcement officer, child protective investigator or prosecutor, “or any immediate family member thereof.”2
Where an assistant helps
- Finding patterns. A Social Security number, a card number, a phone number and a date of birth each have a shape, and a tool can find them across hundreds of pages in seconds.
- Marking, not deciding. A first pass that marks every candidate for a person to confirm saves reading time without handing over the decision.
- Consistency. It finds the same number on page 3 and on page 300.
Where it fails
- It can’t know who is protected. An address is an address. Whether it belongs to someone Daniel’s Law covers is a fact about the person, not the page, and nothing on the page tells the tool.
- Scans and handwriting. A scanned site plan or a form filled in by hand can defeat text recognition, and old files are full of both.
- A box isn’t a redaction. Some tools draw over text without removing it, and the text can still be copied out of the released file.
- It can mark too much. A tool that marks every name and number withholds what the public has a right to see.
What a person must check
- Every mark, before release.
- Every page the tool couldn’t read.
- Every home address, against what the custodian knows about who is protected.
- The released file itself: open it, search it and try to copy from it, to be sure the text is gone.
The custodian answers for every release. I’ve published a test of a redaction assistant on made-up records, before running it: “Redaction assist on synthetic public records responses.”
Sources
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New Jersey Government Records Council, A Citizen’s Guide to the Open Public Records Act, Fifth Edition, October 2024. Accessed September 27, 2026. ↑
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Open Public Records Act, N.J.S.A. 47:1A-1.1 (definitions; Justia, 2025 edition). Accessed September 27, 2026. ↑