Beware Your Trail of Digital Fingerprints

NYTimes

. . . The issue increasingly nags at the legal system, as lawyers become aware of the advantages of requesting discovery of the metadata buried in word-processed documents (or debate the ethics of scrubbing the metadata from a file before turning it over to the other side).

"If I get a piece of paper, all I see is a piece of paper," Mr. Kennedy said. "With an electronic document, there's potentially a lot more there." He noted that at a recent conference on electronic discovery, an Oregon lawyer complained that judges there tended to rebuff requests for the electronic versions of printed documents, saying the printed versions are enough.

But for most other instances - and certainly for cases like the Alito memo - the solutions are simple. Sort of.

Saving a copy of a document in "rich text format" (RTF), or as a simple text file first (options in the Save menu), and then converting it into the common "portable document format" (PDF) before circulating it is a good tack, Mr. Kennedy said. Still, some debate remains as to whether traces of metadata from word-processing programs like Microsoft Word are carried through to the PDF file.

For those who want to be extra safe, several third-party tools will scrub metadata and other information from documents, although with each new advance in software design, the number of potential pitfalls grows. ...