Metadata in Vista Could Be Too Helpful

linumax writes "Windows Vista will improve search functionality on a PC by letting users tag files with metadata, but those tags could cause unwanted and embarrassing information disclosure, Gartner analysts have warned. Search and organization capabilities are among the primary features of Windows Vista, the successor to Windows XP due out late in 2006. While building those features, Microsoft is not paying enough attention to managing the descriptive information, or metadata, that users can add to files to make it easier to find and organize data on a PC, according to Gartner. 'This opens up the possibility of the inadvertent disclosure of this metadata to other users inside and outside of your organization,' Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald wrote in a research note published on Thursday."

Comments

Re:Word: "Properties" and Track Changes

[C10H14N2]

...and these are a few of the many reasons why I print to PDF and never, ever, ever send MS Word files.

Re:Company policy.

[arkanes]

The virtual printer technique won't preserve metadata because it's not document aware - it presents itself as a Windows printing device, the application uses standard Win API drawing commands on it, and the driver internally translates those commands into postscript and then into PDF. Do watch out for redactions, like drawing black boxes over text - the application will likely print this as the text with a box over it, which will look fine on paper but the redacted text will remain in the document. This happened at least once with a redatected DoD document, exposing them to some fairly serious embaressment because they're redacted all the negative parts of an independent audit.

The places you need to worry about metadata exposure are the document-aware "export" functionality, because rather than simply printing from primitives, these work with full knowledge of the document and it's structure.