What is a metadata?
The Spanish Society for Scientific Documentation and Information (SEDIC) defines metadata as "all descriptive information about the context, quality, condition or characteristics of a resource or information object that is intended to facilitate its recovery, authentication, evaluation, preservation and /or interoperability”.
All this information is not visible to the naked eye, but the user must be aware of its existence since it normally contains sensitive information. Therefore, it poses a risk in case the document is distributed to unauthorized personnel.
As a consequence, it is important to know how to protect private and confidential information with protection measures such as document metadata cleaning. In this way, the risk of sensitive information being revealed through metadata will be minimized.
How to check the metadatas?
The metadata net supposes to remove all the additional information contingent in fields corresponding to the metadata of electronic documents such as archives of images or multimedia, full loads of calculations, presentations or graphics, among others.
Documents
- Microsoft Office and LibreOffice office documents. They contain metadata in the "Properties" of the file. They include details to describe and identify it such as the title, author's name, subject, and tags to identify the content of the document and to be able to filter searches.
- PDF documents. They also have document properties where metadata inserted automatically by the application is stored, such as the Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creation and modification dates or Application with which the PDF document was created or standard and custom metadata inserted by the user or organization.
Images
Images use multiple file formats, the most common being TIFF, JPEG, PSD, and RAW. Each of these formats has its own rules on how to store the associated metadata.
Mobile devices, both iOS and Android, allow you to add geographic location information to photos taken with the device's camera. This information is known as geotags (or geotags). Also digital cameras include this functionality. It is recommended not to use it, especially for the publication or distribution of images on the Internet.
