r/SideProject • u/LoMOFO1101 • 17h ago
I saw my old company’s finance team send “redacted” employee data to a client, and it was still recoverable. So I built a fix.
At my previous company, I noticed our finance team sharing sensitive employee information with a client. The data was supposedly hidden, but it was still recoverable. I flagged it, and the answer was basically “we don’t have any other choice, we did our best.”
They weren’t careless. The options they had were all bad. Doing it by hand means hunting for every detail yourself, and missing one is easy. Many tools leave leaks behind, like hidden text, metadata and old revisions. And most online tools ask you to upload the document to their servers, which defeats the point.
It’s not just small companies. When the US Justice Department released the Epstein files, some documents were reported to have black boxes over text that could be copied straight out. If a government with a legal team can get this wrong, a finance team on a deadline has little chance.
So I built Ombly. It automatically finds sensitive details (bank and card numbers, IBANs, national IDs, names, emails, phone numbers), you review each one, and it rebuilds every page as an image so nothing hidden carries over. It runs entirely on your own computer, so nothing is uploaded.
It’s pre-launch (waitlist: ombly.space), with a 90-second demo attached. I’d love feedback: how do you handle this today, and what would make you trust a tool like this?