Beware your trail of digital fingerprints
Watch what you say when you distribute a rather controversial, unsigned Word Document through a network. There are pieces of data that, while not on the actual document itself, can still be discerned through 3rd-party software: metadata. It can contain everything from the date it was created, down to had a hand in creating the document. The DNC (Democratic National Convention) found that one out the hard way….
It hardly ranks in the annals of “gotcha!” but right-wing blogs were buzzing for at least a few days last week when an unsigned Microsoft Word document was circulated by the Democratic National Committee. The memo referred to the “anti-civil rights and anti-immigrant rulings” of Samuel A. Alito Jr., the federal appeals court judge who has been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bush. The stern criticisms of Judge Alito rubbed some commentators the wrong way (Chris Matthews of MSNBC called it “disgusting” last Monday). But whatever the memo’s rhetorical pitch, right-leaning bloggers revealed that it contained a much more universal, if unintended, message: It pays to mind your metadata.Technically, metadata is sort of the DNA of documents created with modern word-processing software. By default, it is automatically saved into the deep structure of a file, hidden from view, with information that can hint at authorship, times and dates of revisions (along with names of editors) and other tidbits that, while perhaps useful to those creating the document, might be better left unseen by the wider world.
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