Delete PDF Metadata Before You Share

The situations where PDF metadata has actually caused problems

PDF metadata leaks are a recurring story rather than a theoretical risk, and the pattern is consistent: a document is prepared internally, edited, then published without being rewritten.

• Documents published by organisations that revealed the individual author of an anonymous or corporate submission
• Tenders and proposals where the Creator string revealed a template reused from a competitor's bid
• Legal filings where the timestamps contradicted the account of when a document was prepared
• Reports where an incremental update preserved an earlier, more candid draft inside the published file
• Job applications where the Author field carried a previous employer's account name

A pre-send checklist

Deleting metadata handles the file. A couple of other things are worth a look at the same time.

• Delete the metadata, then confirm the verification panel reports no entries and one revision
• Check that anything redacted was actually removed rather than covered — select the text under the black box and see whether it copies
• Check the filename, which is not metadata but travels with the document all the same
• If the document was assembled from others, check that embedded attachments were intended

Why the revision count is the number to watch

After cleaning, the tool reports how many revisions the output has. It should be one. A file with more than one revision has an edit history physically present inside it, whatever its properties dialog says.

This is the single most useful indicator that a PDF has been genuinely cleaned rather than superficially edited, and it is why the count is shown before and after rather than hidden.