Ride the Lightning

Adobe's Advice on Purging PDF Documents of Metadata

August 3, 2010

Dave Stromfeld, Acrobat's Senior Product Manager, wrote me a very thoughtful comment with respect to removing metadata from PDFs. An excellent description of how one can make sure PDF documents are thoroughly scrubbed!

Hi Sharon.

I wanted to leave a quick comment on your 7/13 blog post:
http://ridethelightning.senseient.com/2010/07/metadata-scrubbing-are-lawyers-finally-getting-the-message.html

You are correct that the act of creating a PDF using Adobe Acrobat does not necessarily scrub that document of all metadata. This is because first and foremost, the PDF should be a faithful representation of the original document. If the original document contained text, graphics and layout, the user wants the PDF to contain that same text, graphics and layout. And (usually), if the original document contained information like “Document Title” or “Document Keywords”, the user wants the PDF to contain that information (that metadata) as well.

However there are certainly cases where the user does not want the PDF to contain the original document information. For those users, I would recommend they look at two areas of Adobe Acrobat:

• If the user is creating a PDF with Acrobat, Acrobat has various ways in its creation tools to not retain the document information or metadata. For example, if the user is converting from Word to PDF on Windows using Acrobat’s PDFMaker functionality, there is a checkbox called “Convert Document Information” which (when unchecked) will not retain information like Title or Author when the Word document is converted to PDF.

• Regardless of how the PDF was created, Acrobat 8 and higher have a powerful tool called Examine Document, which will scan through the PDF, identify any potential hidden information and allow the user to remove it with a single click. This can include metadata, comments, bookmarks, file attachments and even “hidden text” (text hidden by another object or white text on white background). This tool can give a user confidence that (regardless of how the PDF was created), he can check what information may be in that document prior to publishing it. For more information about Examine Document, your readers could check out the Acrobat Help File here or they could read this good overview article here (which includes a link to an excellent eSeminar on “Redaction and Metadata Removal”).

Thanks and kind regards,

Dave Stromfeld

Dave – This is truly excellent information and I thank you for taking the time to write. I will continue to pass this information along in my lectures. Here's where I see a problem: Lawyers by and large will blindly accept defaults, both because they don't know what the software options are and because they are in a hurry. Examine Document is a very powerful feature, but unless an attorney is dealing with a very sensitive document, he or she is unlikely to take the time to go through these extra steps.

What people like about pure metadata scrubbers is the idiot box that pops up to ask whether you want metadata scrubbed from the document when you attach it to an e-mail. While I understand the "faithful representation" of the original document that you describe above, I wonder whether users wouldn't prefer the easy choice of a pop-up box that allows the user to keep or scrub the metadata. Curious if I am missing something here? Happy to continue the discussion . . . and thanks again for writing!

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