Anonymous mailers or leaflets dispersed to voters in hopes in influencing opinions are as old as American democracy itself. During colonial times, such seminal works as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the Federalist Papers were originally published anonymously to advocate for colonies independence from Britain. In modern times, anonymous mailers have earned a more pejorative reputation, thanks to their use in campaigns to smear the reputation of politicians with dubious allegations, such as when the late Sen. John McCain was attacked with anonymous mailers in the lead-up to the 2000 presidential primary in South Carolina. Voters fed up with these anonymous mailers can turn to state regulators, such as the Fair Political Practices Commission in California. However, there is another way to directly take on these anonymous mailers – through metadata.
There have been several incidents where metadata left on anonymous publications has been used to expose the author, which shows that while individuals can go to great lengths to hide their identity, they can forget that PDF and Word documents record their names for anyone to see by default. The metadata on PDF files can be viewed by opening the PDF, then selecting “File” in the upper left corner, then selecting “Properties.” When the Properties box pops up, it typically defaults to show “Description,” which will show you the author of the PDF file, unless it has been deleted. For Word files, the metadata can be viewed by either following the same process as outlined above for PDF files (i.e. when open select File, then View All Properties), or by right-clicking the document before it is owned and selecting “Properties,” then once the box pops up selecting “Details.”
To remove the metadata from a PDF file, with the document open select “File” -> “Properties,” and the Description box will include the most important metadata fields, which you can delete by hand. For a Word file, metadata can be removed by right-click the file and selecting “Properties” -> “Details,” which will provide an option to “Remove Properties and Personal Information,” thereby removing the metadata from the file.