Comment by mrguyorama
1 month ago
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.
The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on
Sorry, but a professional user not having an operational understanding of the tools they're working with is called culpable negligence in any other profession. A home user not knowing how MS Word works is fine, but we're talking desk clerks whose primary task is document management, and lawyers who were explicitly tasked with data redaction for digital publication. I don't think we should excuse or normalize this level of incompetence.
I don't expect radiologists to have a good understanding of the software involved in the control loops for the equipment they operate. Why should a lawyer have to have a mental model or even understand how the pdf rendering engine works?
Have you ever had to actually react a document in acrobat pro? It's way more fiddly and easy to screw up than one would expect. Im not saying professionals shouldn't learn how to use their tools, but the UI in acrobat is so incredibly poor that I completely understand when reaction gers screwed up. Up thread there's an in complete but very extensive list of this exact thing happening over and over. Clearly there's a tools problem here. Actual life-critical systems aren't developed this way, if a plane keeps crashing due to the same failure we don't blame the pilot. Boeing tried to do that with the max, but they weren't able to successfully convince the industry that that was OK.
if a plane keeps crashing due to the same failure we don't blame the pilot
That's true, we blame the manufacturer and demand that they fix their product under threat of withdrawing the airworthiness certification. So where's the demand for Adobe to fix its software, under pain of losing their cash cow?
Yet, people here are arguing that it is perfectly OK that professionals keep working with tools that are apparently widely known to be inappropriate for their task. Why should we not blame the lawyers that authorized the use of inappropriate tooling for such a sensitive task as legal redaction of documents?