You thought you sent a one-page letter. What you actually sent was a one-page letter and a small pile of paperwork the letter filled out about itself when you weren’t looking.
That paperwork is metadata — data about data. And it travels with your files whether or not you invited it along for the trip.
Metadata is the stuff a document quietly jots down while you’re jotting down words. There’s a lot of potential information there: Who created it, when, and on what computer.
Who edited it, and when they last saved it . Where a photo was taken, down to the GPS coordinates. What camera, what settings, what software. None of it shows up on the page. All of it comes along, like a stowaway.
Most of the time this is harmless, but occasionally, it’s the whole story.
A photo is a very talkative little file.
Take a picture with your phone and you’ve created a small autobiography. The image, surely, but tucked inside is a section called EXIF data: the make and model of the phone, the date and time down to the second, and, if location services were on, the exact spot on Earth where you stood. Share that photo in its original form and you may be handing over your home address without meaning to.
The good news: most social platforms started stripping this out a few years ago when there was a public hue and cry about it. The bad news: “most” is not “all,” and emailing the original file, or dropping it in a shared folder, sends the whole talkative package along.
Documents keep a diary too
A Word document remembers more than the final draft. Depending on your settings, it can carry the author’s name, the company the software was registered to, how long the file was open, and sometimes, tracked changes and comments you thought you’d removed. Every “on second thought, delete that paragraph” can live on in the file’s memory.
The internet is dotted with cautionary tales of press releases and legal filings that were sent out with the edits still readable underneath. The same is true with newsworthycongressional hearings. Most of us are not popular enough to warrant interest from the government. Still, the words on the page said one thing but the metadata said “here’s what we almost admitted.” Oopsie.
So, what to do?
There’s no need to get paranoid about this. Depending on what you’re shipping for, your grocery list is not a national secret. But a few practical habits go a long way:
- Before sending anything sensitive, look under the hood. In Word on Windows, “Inspect Document” should find and remove hidden data, comments, and tracked changes. Do it on the final version, not the draft.
- Turn off location tagging for your camera if you don’t need it — or scrub EXIF data from photos before sharing the originals. By the way, if litigation is foreseen that involves these photos, don’t scrub the EXIF metadata. It will be considered spoliation of data and will go poorly for you if and when it goes to court.
- Remember that “delete” inside a file often just means “hide.” Removing a comment from view is not always the same as removing it from the file.
None of this requires becoming a hermit. It’s the digital equivalent of checking your pockets before you send the coat to the cleaners.
Metadata isn’t sinister. It’s just honest — sometimes more honest than we’d like. The trick is knowing it’s there, so you decide what to share instead of the file deciding for you.
Steve Burgess is a digital forensics expert witness with more than 40 years of experience and over 20,000 devices and digital media examined. He is the principal of Burgess Forensics, founded in 1984.
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