Comment by bena
4 hours ago
I think it's part laziness here.
Placing a black rectangle on a PDF is easier than modifying an image or removing text from that same PDF.
4 hours ago
I think it's part laziness here.
Placing a black rectangle on a PDF is easier than modifying an image or removing text from that same PDF.
The consequences of fucking it up are low, too.
If they get caught, they just take the document down and deny it ever got posted. Claim whatever people can show is a fake.
Since they control the levers of government, there's few with the resources and appetite for holding them accountable. So far, we haven't un-redacted anything too damning, so push hasn't come to shove yet.
The only might change if there's a "blue wave" in the midterms, but even then I wouldn't count on it.
The tool in Acrobat is exactly placing black rectangles on stuff. There's a second step you are supposed to do when you are finishing marking the redactions that edits out the content underneath them, and offers to sanitize other hidden data:
https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/how-to-redact-a-pdf....
That failed redactions happen over and over and over is kind of amazing.
I hope you're not blaming the users. It's understandable they would be confused. The software needs to clarify it for the user. Perhaps, when you try to save it, it should warn you that it looks like you tried to redact text, and that text is still embedded in the document and could be extracted. And then direct you to more information on how to complete the redaction.
The link in the comment you are replying to has a screenshot of exactly this. it’s a prompt with a checkbox asking you to delete the metadata and hidden info involved with the redaction. you’d have to blaze past that and not read it to make this mistake. It is user error.
I guess if you really want to defend users here you could say people are desensitized so much by popup spam that a popup prompt is gonna just be click through’d so fast the user probably barely recognizes it, but that’s not the software’s problem. For whatever reason some users would prefer to just put black boxes over obfuscated text, so here we are
The software could do better, sure, but in this case the accountability clearly falls on the lawyers. It's their job - and it's a job that can profoundly impact people's lives, so they need to take it seriously - to redact information properly.
Professional users doing more than 1 document? Yes, I'm absolutely blaming them.
I agree that affordances are good, but tools are tools, they can have rough edges, it's okay that it occasionally takes more than zero knowledge and attention to use them.
We have 30 years direct evidence that the users would ignore that warning, complain about the computer warning them too much, insist that the warning is entirely unnecessary, and then release a document with important information unredacted.
The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on. They don't think of a PDF as a set of rendering instructions that can overlap. They think it's paper. Because that's what it pretends to be.
The best fix for this in almost any organization is the one that untrained humans will understand: After you redact, you print out and scan back in. You have policy that for redacted documents, they must be scanned in of a physical paper.