In February 2003, 10 Downing Street published a dossier on Iraq's security and intelligence organizations. Colin Powell, then the U.S. Secretary of State, cited that dossier in his address to the United Nations a few months later. Then, a lecturer of politics at Cambridge University discovered that the information in the document was dated by at least ten years and the majority of it was written by a U.S. researcher on Iraq. How did the lecturer discover this? He took a look at the logs in the document's metadata.
Metadata are hidden information stored in documents. These data include who created the document, who edited it, what changes were made, what keywords or subjects are associated with that document, along with multiple other built-in properties. Whenever you digitally share an Office document, that document carries with it this set of information that you may now want to publicly share.
There are three kinds of metadata: MS Office Metadata, commonly seen in the Properties tab of a document; Windows Properties, that contains a range of additional sensitive information; and Internal Properties, that share details of an internal filename, DMS information and the internal saved location of that document. These properties can be views and recreated by a client or third party without your knowledge.
Metadact, from Litera Corp. and Softwise Corporation, removes all three forms of sensitive metadata from your document. The solution integrates fully with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. Use the Metadata Suite to quickly and easily remove built-in file properties, comments, hidden or small text, tracked changes and other personal information. Or use the Batch Tool to process multiple files at one time.
