Scanning Your Passport? Read This First

Data · 2026-01-15 · 8 min read

IDs, tax slips and bank statements are the documents people scan most and should share least. Here's what goes wrong when copies end up in the wrong place, and why a black box over text isn't always a redaction.

In 2024, the FTC received more than 1.1 million reports of identity theft through IdentityTheft.gov. Many begin with someone else getting hold of details that were meant to be yours alone.

The Documents We Scan Are the Ones That Matter

Nobody needs a scanner app for a takeaway menu. People scan the paperwork life demands: a passport for a rental application, a driver's licence for a new job, tax slips for an accountant, a pay stub for a mortgage broker, a bank statement for proof of address. These are exactly the documents an identity thief would want, gathered in one place, complete with the account numbers and dates of birth an attacker needs.

1.1M+: Identity theft reports to IdentityTheft.gov, 2024
$12.5B: Fraud losses reported to the FTC, 2024
13,000: ID and selfie images exposed in the Tea breach
0: Network requests made by HushScan

Copies Outlive Their Purpose

The risk with a scanned ID is rarely the moment you scan it. It is every copy that exists afterwards. In July 2025, the dating-safety app Tea confirmed that about 72,000 images had been accessed from a legacy storage system, including roughly 13,000 selfies and photo IDs that users had submitted to verify their accounts. Reporters found the files in an unsecured cloud storage bucket, and a download script was shared on 4chan.

Tea's privacy policy had said verification photos would be deleted right after verification. They had been kept, and Tea said it held them for legal and cyberbullying-prevention reasons. The users had done nothing wrong: they sent an ID once, for one purpose, and lost control of it the moment it reached a server. Driver's licences and selfies from the breach were later reported to be circulating as torrents on hacking forums.

The Black Box That Covers Nothing

When people do share a scan, they often try to cover what the recipient doesn't need: a passport number, a SIN or Social Security number, an account balance. How that covering is done matters more than most people realise.

On December 19, 2025, the US Justice Department began releasing documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. Within days, The New York Times reported that in some files the redacted text could be revealed by copying the blacked-out passages and pasting them into another file. The Justice Department said the redactions in those files had been applied by parties to the litigation they came from. Separately, CNN reported that a survivor who had sought anonymity found her name left unredacted in the files.

A redaction that only draws a shape over a PDF is a costume, not a removal. If the text layer survives, anyone can select it, copy it or search for it.

The same mistake is easy to make on a phone. Many scanner apps add a searchable text layer to every PDF, which is the point of OCR. Marking up the image afterwards covers the pixels but can leave the recognised words intact in that layer.

A Short Checklist Before You Scan an ID

Scan only the pages that were asked for, and only the side that is needed.
Check where the app stores the file, and whether it uploads it by default.
Redact numbers the recipient doesn't need before you send, with a tool that removes the text rather than drawing over it.
After sharing, delete copies you no longer need from chat threads and email drafts.
Prefer a channel you control over uploading to an unfamiliar portal.

How HushScan Approaches IDs

HushScan has scanning modes for IDs, passports, receipts and contracts. Everything it creates stays in the app's private storage on your iPhone: the page images, the text recognised from them, and your document names and folders. There is no account, no cloud sync and no networking code, so there is no server copy to leak.

HushScan can find personal information on a page, such as card numbers, passport numbers and addresses, and redact it in one tap. Its redaction paints over the pixels in the image itself and discards the recognised text layer, so the covered content can't be recovered by selecting, copying or searching the exported file. Automatic detection finds most personal information but is not guaranteed to find all of it, so check before you share: you can add or remove redaction areas yourself before committing.

You can also lock the app with Face ID. iOS handles the check, and HushScan only learns whether it succeeded; it never receives your biometric data.

Sources

Federal Trade Commission, 'New FTC data show a big jump in reported losses to fraud to $12.5 billion in 2024', March 10, 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/03/new-ftc-data-show-big-jump-reported-losses-fraud-125-billion-2024
BleepingComputer, 'Tea app leak worsens with second database exposing user chats', July 2025. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tea-app-leak-worsens-with-second-database-exposing-user-chats/
National Law Review, 'The safest space spill: Tea dating safety app targeted in massive data breach', July 2025. https://natlawreview.com/article/safest-space-spill-tea-dating-safety-app-targeted-massive-data-breach
Santul Nerkar, The New York Times, 'Redacted Material in Some Epstein Files Is Easily Recovered', December 23, 2025 (text read as reposted at https://gvwire.com/2025/12/24/redacted-material-in-some-epstein-files-is-easily-recovered/)
MJ Lee, CNN, 'One Jane Doe tells CNN she is mortified that her name is unredacted multiple times in the Epstein files', December 22, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/22/politics/epstein-survivors-files-redactions
NPR, on the Justice Department's first Epstein file release, December 19, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/19/nx-s1-5615152/epstein-files-release-trump-pam-bondi-democrats