I'm planning on creating a bunch of PDF screenshots for a thread I'm making, and I was wondering are PDF's "clean" from any personal metadata or EXIF that could get traced back to me? I like using PDFs as page archives since they contain urls you can easily click, as well as text that can be copied. Thanks
I can remove personal data via Acrobat manually, but is there a process that can do this in bulk? Also would there be additional steps I need to take besides stripping the data?
If you've created the PDF in either Word (and then printed to PDF) or in Acrobat itself, it does contain identifying information. Here's an example of one of my old file's output, created in Word and exported using Adobe's PDFMaker:
again, you can run the following command: exiftool -all= "pdf1.pdf" "pdf2.pdf" "pdf3.pdf" in either CMD or Powershell (after renaming the .exe to exiftool.exe). It gives this output of EXIF data instead:
While it does say on their website that the original metadata are never removed completely, I've not been able to find any traces of old metadata after running my PDF through exiftool.
As for other stuff, the only thing I can think of right now, is to first make sure your links doesn't have any "hidden" referrals in them and secondly to check and remove any EXIF data you might have in the screenshots as well, you can of course use exiftool for this too.
Thankfully I keep my VPN turned on at all times so that shouldn't be a problem. As for converting the PDFs, I still want the unique utility of PDFs so I'm probably not going to convert them but thanks for the suggestion.
Wow this was really useful! Thankfully I think I lucked out with the pdf extension I use (FireShot) since I think it might have never actually saved out the exif data to begin with.
When I ran the command on a test file created with the extension curiously the output was unchanged. To test my theory I ran an old pdf not created with this extension (that I knew for a fact had metadata on it) and the program cleaned the data as designed. The great news is now I don't need to bother scrubbing metadata from hundreds of pdfs, but this still is an extremely useful tool I'll no doubt use in the future. Thanks a ton for the suggestion!
