[gmueckl]

There may be a middle ground where, with some effort effort, a watered down summary of the redacted information could be given (e.g. if a name of a person is redacted, replace it with some sort of unique handle). As long as this is done as an annotations for the visibly marked redaction, I see no problem. The reader may choose to trust those annotations or not.

[rglover]

This would be fair (I hadn't considered names in my original comment). Whether truly sensitive or not, protecting names/addresses/numbers/etc. would make sense (especially if there was a footnote to a "why" something was redacted).

[Muromec]

Ukrainian court rulings do this -- it's always person_1 meeting person_2 at address_1, so only the parties have an unredacted ruling, while redacted one is publicly searchable

[cgriswald]

Plain redactions require the same amount of trust in the redacter but are less likely to leak information.