Copying the PDF document and pasting into a Microsoft Word document allowed all the redacted information to magically appear.
This is a great example of metaphor failure. If you take a black permanent marker and color over writing on a piece of paper, you're doing a pretty good job of destroying that information. If you draw a black box over some writing in a PDF, you're leaving the data completely intact.
If a software product uses a metaphor for some real-world object, anywhere it acts differently from that object will be confusing.
In the printing industry, I see this sort of thing all the time. People assume that drawing a white or black box on top of something makes it go away just because it doesn't print out on a piece of paper.
My other favorite one is putting a huge image in a crop box to use just a small part of the image, and then complaining that their PDF is still so huge, because, you know, they cropped it so it should be smaller. They seldom believe me when I tell them that the whole image is still there, until I show them by uncropping it inside Acrobat.
This is a great example of metaphor failure. If you take a black permanent marker and color over writing on a piece of paper, you're doing a pretty good job of destroying that information. If you draw a black box over some writing in a PDF, you're leaving the data completely intact.
If a software product uses a metaphor for some real-world object, anywhere it acts differently from that object will be confusing.