I'm curious what kind of sensitive information you're concerned about exposing. I don't mind deploying with rsync--in fact, I'll do it quite a lot when the remote host lacks git--but I'd usually prefer to use git where possible.

I typically deploy with a similar setup that you described, but instead of rsync'ing the files locally I just make a clone of the repo and serve that. Though it is another step to fetch/merge, it stops me from losing any changes that someone did to production without telling me.

I only recently used Capistrano to deploy a project and it was very satisfying, so I'm gravitating towards that as my default deployment method.