unCubeme

Several years ago, a huge blunder was made when a document circulated by the Democratic National Committee revealed too much information–beneath the surface. The document contained all sorts of information called metadata that the author had not intended to be carried with the document. Merck was discovered to have deleted data revealing correlation between Vioxx and heart attacks when metadata were examined. The list includes unintentional corporate earnings previews, etc. Microsoft Office products tend to collect this information automatically, by default.

Metadata could be best described as data about data. In the Microsoft Office case, the metadata is data about the document. Microsoft explains it this way:

Whenever you create, open, or save a document in any of the programs listed at the beginning of this article, the document may contain information that you may not want to share with others if you distribute the document electronically. This information is known as “metadata”. Metadata is used for a variety of purposes to enhance the editing, viewing, filing, and retrieval of Office documents.

These data could include confidential information or just some things that the author would not normally want to be included in a mass distributed document (e.g., revisions, hidden data, information about authors, network data for documents on shared disks, etc.). The Office applications were designed for creating documents; not mass proliferation.

Because of this, many organizations are raising awareness of metadata in employees to protect their intellectual property (and probably try and minimize evidence in the event of tort culpability). I want to take a look at some ways of turning off this type of data mining in Word and Excel in my future columns.

In the meantime, just be aware of the metadata risk.