Remove Properties and Personal Information: A Misleading Feature!

The Remove Properties and Personal Information feature has been introduced in Windows Vista® by Microsoft® to allow users to remove metadata from several file formats, either from one file at a time or from a group of files en masse. Removing metadata from files before sharing them with others is important for preventing sensitive personal information leakage. However, this feature is unsuitable for the task since it supports a small number of file formats, it can remove a small number of metadata elements, and above all, it provides a dangerous false sense of privacy protection due to its highly misleading user interface.

To access this feature, the user needs to select one or more files in Windows Explorer, right-click and select Properties from the context menu. In the "Properties" window, the user needs to select the Details tab, and then click on the Remove Properties and Personal Information link at the bottom.

Contents

• The Small Problem: A Very Limited Support of File Formats and Metadata Elements
  
  
• The Big Problem: A Highly Misleading User Interface
  
  
• Other Shortcomings
  
  
• Public's Reliance On This Feature
  
  
• Conclusion
  
  
• Related White Papers

The Small Problem: A Very Limited Support of File Formats and Metadata Elements

The Remove Properties and Personal Information feature has a built-in support for the removal of only a small number of properties from only nine supported file formats: Old Microsoft Office® 2003 files, (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files with three letter extension - DOC, XLS, and PPT) JPEG, TIFF, PNG, MP3, MP4, and ASF. (including WMA and WMV)

It's possible for software developers to extend the supported file formats and metadata formats of the Remove Properties and Personal Information feature. Notably, if Microsoft Office® 2007 or above is installed on the computer, this feature can also remove some properties from Microsoft Office® 2007-2021 files, (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files with four letter extension - DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX) as well as OpenDocument Text files.

Even when removing all possible properties that this feature supports from supported file formats, a wealth of potentially harmful hidden data & metadata are being left in the files. This steams from the fact that this feature was not built from the ground up as a hidden data & metadata remover, but merely used the very limited metadata editing capability that existed in Windows.

The following table summarizes the built-in support for the removal of properties by the Remove Properties and Personal Information feature in Windows 11, and the unsupported hidden data & metadata:

The following table summarizes the additional support for the removal of properties by the Remove Properties and Personal Information feature when Microsoft Office® 2007 or above is installed on the computer, and the unsupported hidden data & metadata:

Official documentation from Microsoft of this feature's capabilities is nowhere to be found. The above information was gathered by research done by this article's author.

The Big Problem: A Highly Misleading User Interface

However, there is an even bigger problem than the very limited support of file formats and metadata elements - its highly misleading user interface! After clicking on the "Remove Properties and Personal Information" link, the user is presented with the "Remove Properties" window. In it, the user have two options to choose from: "Create a copy with all possible properties removed" and "Remove the following properties from this file".

The user might easily believe that the file contains only the properties shown in the window, when in fact it may, and often does, contain a whole lot more properties and other types of potentially privacy-compromising hidden data.

Also, the user might easily believe that selecting "Create a copy with all possible properties removed" will create a copy with all possible properties THAT FILE CAN HOLD removed, when in fact it will create a copy with all possible properties that THIS FEATURE SUPPORTS THEIR REMOVAL removed. The properties that will be removed are only the ones that have check boxes next to them, when selecting the option "Remove the following properties from this file". If the file format is not supported by this feature, it will create a completely identical copy of the original file, without warning the user that nothing in fact was removed from it. This feature will even allow the user to remove metadata from file formats that cannot hold any metadata. (e.g. Plain Text .txt files )

In addition, if the user attempts to remove all properties from multiple files of different types at once, only the properties that are common to all selected files will be removed. This happens even if the user chooses to create a copy with all possible properties removed. For example, if the user removes properties from a Word file and a JPEG file at once, only the common six properties will be removed from the selected files. (whereas this tool supports 28 JPEG properties and 15 Word properties)

Other Shortcomings

• It cannot remove properties from files in different folders at once, and the user cannot select folders to remove metadata from the files inside. The user must select files only from one folder at a time.
• It cannot remove properties from files compressed in ZIP files
• If the user wishes to selectively remove some properties from a file, the user cannot save it as a new file while keeping the original file with all the properties intact
• It cannot save copies of the files with their properties removed to a different folder

Public's Reliance On This Feature

Unfortunately, many people are misled into believing that the Remove Properties and Personal Information feature adequately protects their privacy, and rely on it since it was created by a well-known big software corporation, and since it's integral to Windows.

This problem is further perpetuated by many articles and blog posts on seemingly reliable websites, advocating using this feature to remove metadata from many types of document and media files, including types entirely unsupported by this feature, such as PDF, and even from "any file". To make things worse, this misleading content often appear high in search engines results when searching using such queries as "how to remove metadata from files".

Conclusion

The Remove Properties and Personal Information feature is not a reliable tool for removing potentially harmful and privacy-compromising hidden data & metadata from files intended to be shared with others.

To properly remove hidden data & metadata from files, one must use a dedicated tool for the file types one wishes to clean, with a broad-spectrum of supported hidden data & metadata types.

For Microsoft Office® files, for example, the integral Document Inspector tool that is included in Microsoft Office® does a decent job. However, this tool has no batch hidden data removal capability. There are, however, third-party tools for removing hidden data & metadata from multiple files at once, such as BatchPurifier™.

Related White Papers

• Windows File Properties Viewer: Falsely Alarming, Dangerously Reassuring
• Hidden Data and Metadata Frequently Asked Questions
• The Importance of Using Metadata Removal Software