It's been ages since I read it and I am 99% sure I'm remember horribly wrong, but I was thinking it's something like this? Also - your "the only information" is precisely what we can measure of quantum states, so information is still preserved. That's more a limit of what we know?
I think that with Hawking radiation you have quantum entanglement of two pairs. You have a matter-antimatter pair production near the horizon. When the antimatter falls into the blackhole without being destroyed via mutual annihilation, the matter particle at the boundary now "radiates" away. HOWEVER.
The matter inside boundary which the anti-matter DOES interact with is destroyed, and the information of that interaction is is "passed" to the outside via the the anti-matter's entanglement with its co-created pair.
Something like that, isn't it? Please any physicists clarify :)
> I think that with Hawking radiation you have quantum entanglement of two pairs. You have a matter-antimatter pair production near the horizon. When the antimatter falls into the blackhole without being destroyed via mutual annihilation, the matter particle at the boundary now "radiates" away. HOWEVER.
That's not how Hawking radiation actually works. It's just a "lies-to-the-children" explanation. Antiparticles have positive mass, so the black hole would be _growing_ as a result. This mechanism also violates the equivalency principle, as you shouldn't be able to detect the event horizon with only local observations.
Reality is more interesting. In flat space, the ground state of quantum fields is actually non-zero. But black holes "bias" the fields in such a way that their ground state becomes _negative_ from the viewpoint of a remote observer.
This in turn permits it to create new particles from just nothing. This in turn adds _negative_ energy to that space, resulting in the black hole decreasing in mass.
But crucially, the event horizon itself is NOT involved. Particle creation can happen anywhere in the vicinity of the black hole, not just on the event horizon.