Re: Meta data. . .

Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Nov 2006, kelly wrote:
>
>> Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2006 16:08:13 -0700
>> From: kelly <kelly@chiefsez.com>
>> To: abiword-user@abisource.com
>> Subject: Meta data. . .
>>
>>
>> Does Abiword use meta data and if so how do I prevent its use?
>
> That is a slightly confusing question, but once you understand the
> question better the answer is a lot easier. Metadata is just data about
> data, or to put it another way extra descriptive information about the
> document.
>
> Every document contains additional unseen information but in most cases it
> is not necessarily a security or even a privacy risk. You can see exactly
> what is contained in an abiword document by looking at the raw XML using a
> text editor such as microsoft notepad, gedit, or kate. (Alternatively if
> you are working for a company or with privacy concerns or know any
> programmers they could easily write a small program to run a simple word
> search against the text.)
>
> Abiword probably gives away less information than your email program[1].
> Most programs intentionally give away the fact that they created the
> document. Abiword does not encode any additional date information as far
> as I can tell. Abiword also does not include any extra file path
> information which might give clues to detectives.
>
> There is metadata in a block near the start of the document. As far as I
> know (and as I write this I see Dom has said the same thing) practically
> no information is added automatically and is only added when you go
> to "File, Properties" and fill in the information.
>
> One other features you should be extremely careful about in terms of
> privacy is "Revisions", as users have mistakenly released information by
> leaving in old revisions.
>
> Hope that helps. I also hope someone will take this information and beat
> it into a more structured form and add it to the wiki. Then maybe we can
> act like a business and make a big song and dance about how we respect
> privacy and pretend like we are doing things even better different than we
> have always done! ;P
>
> Sincerely
>
> Alan Horkan
>
>
>
> [1] Email headers reveal you are running Thunderbird on some kind of Unix
> system and there is probably more information there if I were looking
> carefully, the key bit of information was:
> User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 (X11/20060922)
>
>

I thank you all for your time and answering my questions! I feel quite a
bit better now.

The reason for my questions was that recently the American Bar
Association (ABA) stated that legal papers delivered electronically
*could* be searched for meta data and whatever was found *could* be used
in whatever proceeding the electronic documents were intended for.

Thanks again.

Kelly
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Received on Sun Nov 19 08:53:46 2006