Placing a black box on the text isn’t a redaction any more than placing a sticky note would be. No reasonable person can expect a sticky note to permanently prevent readers from seeing text and no reasonable person can expect a black overlay box in pdf to prevent reading text because this is literally a fundamental feature of pdfs as a layer format file

Precisely. If someone wants me to sign a contract on acceptable use of resources (like an agreement not to reverse engineer their software) they send me then that's another thing.

Absent that excluding other default protections like copyright, what I do with it should fall under the assumption of "basically anything".

If this were prior to 2021, I would say the CFAA could be violated so long as the property owner's _intentions_ were for that information to only be accessible to certain users. But I think the CFAA has been sufficiently reduced in scope after Van Buren v United States [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States

Adobe designed pdf to behave this way. Placing layers over text doesn’t remove the text from the file. They have a specific redaction feature for that purpose.

> you can mistakenly receive data you're not authorized to have (might even be criminal to have!)

Not the layman, at least to the best of my knowledge.

Yes, certain licensed professionals can be subject to legal obligations in very specific situations. But in general, if you screw up and mail something to me (electronic or otherwise) then that is on you. I am not responsible for your actions.

> if you have publicly accessible password-protected PDF and guess the password as 1234, that's a hack

Sure, I'll agree that the software to break the DRM qualifies as a hack (in the technical work sense). It also might (or might not) rise to the level of "lack of legal authorization". I don't think it should, but the state of laws surrounding DRM make it clear that one probably wouldn't go in my favor.

However that isn't what (I understood) us to be talking about - ie legal authorization as it relates to black box redaction and similar fatally flawed approaches that leave the plain text data directly accessible (and thus my access plainly facilitated by the sender, if inadvertently).

> this conversation is not about ...

You are the only one using the term "hack" here. Please note that I had responded to your "limit/lack of authorization" phrasing. Nothing more.

That said, while we're on the topic I'll note the ambiguity of the term "hack" in this context. Illegal access versus clever but otherwise mundane bit of code (no laws violated). You seem to be failing to clearly differentiate.