Re: Meta data. . .

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)

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Received on Sun Nov 19 01:00:06 2006