Yeah but there was no lock; somebody put a box around the doorknob without anything holding it there, and somebody removed the box and opened the door.
There's nothing else to say about this. Also, your comment is nested even deeper within the same semantic squabbling, so it's odd that you think that it's a waste of time in light of more important things that you are also not talking about.
They're likely viewing the electronic documents by analogy to photocopies with blacked out sections where there is nothing to distinguish the text from the redacting marks and nothing you can project out. They don't know the structure of the file format and how information in it is encoded or rendered, or even that there is a distinction between encoding and rendering.
(A better analogy might be the original physical document with redaction marks. If the text is printed using a laser printer or a type writer, and the marker used for redaction uses some other kind of ink - let's say one that doesn't dissolve the text's ink or toner in any way - then you can in principle distinguish between the two and thus recover visibility of the text.)
File formats are complicated. The only reliable way to redact is to reduce that complication to one which humans can manage. This is even true for software that is written by humans.
Plain text and flat images are my preferred formats for things which must be redacted. Images require a slight bit of special care, as the example in the underhanded C contest highlights, but it's possible to enforce visible redaction and transcription steps that destroy hidden information.
I think that doesn’t do the scenario justice. They tried to redact and did so in a way that looks visibly redacted (in screenshots many have seen) but can be uncovered.
If you say “they failed to redact data” to a layperson looking at a visibly redacted document they’re going to be confused.
They are not. They are factually incorrect. Look up the various definitions of redacted. They fit perfect for the title. Arguing otherwise suggests you are making up definitions and words, in which case, I am still correct.
To be fair, I put partial blame on the advertisers.
They've been claiming "AI" on their products on anything that has an algorithm basically for the past few years.
Unfortunately “hack” became a catch all word long ago. Just look at “life hacks”.