Do more to indicate where attachments have been subject to redactions by an Alaveteli system

[RichardTaylor]

Redactions may take place via censor rules added by admins, or general site-wide censor rules covering the request-address, email addresses and mobile phone numbers.

Redactions of plain text in messages are accompanied by a replacement text, typically explaining what has been removed and why, or a link to the policy on removing email addresses and mobile numbers.

Redactions in attachments are not done so transparently. An attempt is made to mark replacements with "XXXX" in PDFs, but often redactions in many PDFs, and in other files, are made silently.

User suggestion: Add a note next to each link to an attachment which has been subject to redaction.

I don't think we know if attempted redaction has worked or not on attachments. I suspect we don't have the information to base such a notice on.

I have added a note on the issue for improved PDF redaction, to ask if work there has benefits for replacement text, as well as removing text #5966 (comment)

We could add a note to each "Attachments" section saying that attachments may be subject to redaction by the service. This could confuse users who might not realise that redaction by the service is typically limited to email addresses, mobile numbers and the request address, if we don't explain that. We could link to the relevant help page eg. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/help/officers#mobiles This kind of note may well be disproportionate clutter.

Mock-up showing where such a note could appear:

Related: "Automatically inform requesters by email of hide events, and ideally censor rules, impacting "their" correspondence threads #6708 " #6708 If we know redaction has occurred on thread we could note that on the thread.

[RichardTaylor]

Linked to this is a suggestion to make an offer to provide unredacted copies of material on request. See also #10

[RichardTaylor]

Linked to this is a suggestion to make an offer to provide unredacted copies of material on request.

On WDTK we say

Our volunteer team doesn’t have the capacity to deal with large numbers of requests to reveal email addresses

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/help/officers#mobiles

[FOIMonkey]

+1 I like this idea. It looks neat and would improve transparency.

[mdeuk]

Another +1 here - anything we can do to improve the presentation of "how things work" from a user perspective is a good thing.

[HelenWDTK]

This issue has been automatically closed due to a lack of discussion or resolution for over 12 months.
Should we decide to revisit this issue in the future, it can be reopened.