Spent 6 hours trying to scrub metadata off a PDF and it still showed my location

I was sending a resume to a company in Austin and thought I'd wiped all the hidden info. Used some free online tool, checked it twice, felt good. Then I opened the file on a friend's laptop and it pulled up my home address from the document properties. Has anyone else had a simple file-sharing moment turn into a privacy nightmare?

3 comments

3 Comments

paige42716d ago

Jumped into a group chat once with a document I thought was clean... turned out it had all my editing history in it. Exposed a whole list of places I'd applied to before that I didn't want anyone seeing. It's crazy how deep that stuff hides in the file, like layers of ghosts you can't fully scrub out. Really makes you wonder what else is buried in these files we send around every day.

hollyg5915d ago

Thing is most people don't even realize that metadata exists in files like that. It's not just docs either, you send a screenshot or a photo and there's location data and device info baked into it. There's apps that strip that stuff out but who actually uses them? Nobody. We just hit send and pray. Even with PDFs people think theyre safe but theres hidden layers in those too. It's wild how much we trust file sharing without really knowing what's riding along with the content.

james_singh713d ago

Buddy of mine found old salary info in a PDF he sent to his boss... oops.