Watermark ID Card

A plain copy of an ID card or passport is everything a fraudster needs to open a bank account, rent a flat or take out a loan in your name, and once you email it to a landlord, an employer or a hotel you no longer control where it ends up. Governments therefore recommend a "safe copy": the Dutch government (KopieID app) says to make the citizen service number unreadable and to write on the copy who it is for and the date; the French state service Filigrane Facile adds a text such as "Document exclusively for a rental application"; German law (§ 20 PAuswG) requires that a copy of the Personalausweis is permanently recognisable as a copy, and the interior ministry advises blacking out the access number (CAN) and the document number when they are not needed. A watermark naming the recipient and purpose makes a stolen copy useless anywhere else, because any other company sees it was meant for someone else.

This tool repeats your text in diagonal rows across the whole page, over the photo too, with alternate rows shifted so it cannot be cropped off or cloned away from one clean strip. Black boxes are painted into the picture itself and the result is saved as new pixels only: no text layer, no hidden original under the box, and no camera or GPS data from the phone photo. Black out what the recipient does not need, typically the document number, a personal or tax number, and the machine-readable lines at the bottom, which repeat the document number and date of birth. Leave the fields a bank or notary must check by law. Unlike the French service, your ID is never uploaded: the copy is made in your browser.