Before you redact
Prepares the documents for the work between “a SAR or FOI just landed” and the redaction itself.
SurePrepare
Matter-preparation companion to SureRedact.
SurePrepare prepares the documents before you redact them — for the work that sits between a SAR or FOI landing and the redaction itself. In private pilot, by application.
Pilot enquiries route to pilots@surematters.com — we aim to respond within five working days.
Runs on your laptop
A local-first desktop application, like SureRedact. Connectors for Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and others follow — and deploy into your own cloud, never ours.
Nothing leaves
Your documents do not transit SureMatters’ infrastructure.
The hard part isn’t the redaction
By the time a SAR or FOI request reaches the redaction stage, the difficult work has usually already happened — and it has usually happened by hand. Someone searched the mailboxes and the shared drives. Someone worked out which of several thousand hits were genuinely about the data subject. Someone judged where the search should stop.
- It is rarely written down. The reasoning lives in the head of whoever did it, and it leaves when they do.
- It is rarely done the same way twice. Two colleagues running the same request produce different bundles. So does the same colleague a single day apart.
- It is hard to justify afterwards. The law expects a proportionate search — and expects you to be able to explain the scope you settled on. Since the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 that sits on the statute rather than in case law.
“You must be able to show why a search is unreasonable or disproportionate.”
The ICO separates what you must do from what it expects you to consider. Making a proportionate search is a must, and so is being able to show why you narrowed one. How you weigh that — the volume of material, the difficulty of finding it, the circumstances of the request — is guidance to think through, not a checklist to complete.
SurePrepare makes that stage repeatable and defensible. The scope is authored deliberately rather than improvised, the decisions are recorded as they are taken, and what comes out is a Matter you can open straight in SureRedact with the reasoning still attached to it.
“We searched until it felt like enough” is not a defensible position. Preparing a matter properly, and showing your workings, is.
Apply for a SurePrepare pilot.
A limited cohort, by application. Runs on your own computer; your documents stay on your systems.
For your DPO, IG officer, or procurement reviewer
Public documents: AI Policy · Security overview · Vulnerability Disclosure · Privacy Notice · Terms of Service · Telemetry Transparency · Subprocessors.
Last updated .