Monday’s New York Times had a story, Beware Your Trail of Digital Fingerprints, that warns of the metadata attached to documents that have been edited. This info includes usernames of the people who have edited the document, creation date and sometimes comments that had been deleted.
The issue increasingly nags at the legal system, as lawyers become aware of the advantages of requesting discovery of the metadata buried in word-processed documents (or debate the ethics of scrubbing the metadata from a file before turning it over to the other side).
"If I get a piece of paper, all I see is a piece of paper," Mr. [Dennis M.] Kennedy [a lawyer and consultant based in St. Louis] said. "With an electronic document, there's potentially a lot more there." He noted that at a recent conference on electronic discovery, an Oregon lawyer complained that judges there tended to rebuff requests for the electronic versions of printed documents, saying the printed versions are enough.
The article mentions several ways to scrub your docs.
Posted by bmbsqezm on November 11, 2007 - 04:15 AM
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