Some files in Windows can carry too much personal information in them. For example, a Microsoft Office document contains information about who is the original writer of the document, who last revised it, when was it printed last and more. Not only Microsoft Office documents, but many other types of files may carry this kind of private information. This is clearly a privacy risk as it gives away too much information about a file, if you make that file public. Fortunately, Windows provides an easy method to clear all the personal information from a file. Here is how you can remove personal information from a file :
- Right-click on a file (from which you want to remove personal information) in Windows Explorer and choose Properties from the context-menu, as shown in the picture below :
- In the Properties dialog that shows up, select the Details tab. You would find a link at the bottom titled Remove Properties and Personal Information. You have to click on this link.
- This would popup another window titled – Remove Properties. In this window, you can choose either to create a copy of this file with all the personal information stripped out, or you can choose to manually select which items from the properties are to be removed. Choose a desired option and click OK.
If you choose to create a copy of the original file, then it would create a file in the same folder with Copy – appended to the original file name with all the properties and other personal information removed.
So this is how you can remove your personal information from files that carry metadata and other properties. You can remove information from files one by one, or you can select multiple files of the same type and remove properties from them together.