Rich has a post about metadata and how it has tripped up some "some political wonks." There have been many a document that have revealed too much through metadata. It does not pose a risk to just politicos, although I am having trouble finding a link to a story I read about how metadata has even been problematic for Microsoft. IIRC, the story reported taht documents Microsoft released on their website were chock full of tracked changes and comments posted by employees who reviewed the documents before they were posted.
This slashdot post tells of an Italian PDF that revealed classified information through copy and paste. Whoever converted the PDF did not realize that by simply highlighting the text and setting its background to the text color does not remove the text after it is converted. The text is still readily available, it is just difficult to see because of the colors. It’s just like highlighting the spoiler text on some of Hersch’s posts about Naruto.
This post relates to how several UK officials were linked to the Blair Dossier relating to Iraqi intelligence. Word apparently tracks the usernames that open a document and the file paths of documents saved from it. From the dossier, one can find four users who opened and saved the document, two users saving the document to a floppy disk, and two users using some form of Windows NT or XP.
So, the moral of the story is to be wary of what you open and save because it may come back to bite you in the ass later, despite how anonymous you think the document seemed.
Metadata is so bad that a company has released software to help remove metadata.
0 Responses to “Metadata”