Why "Owner" & "Computer" Properties Cannot be Removed?


People who intend to share files with others are often concerned about the possibility of potentially privacy-compromising hidden data & metadata embedded within them. This concern is indeed justified, as most popular document, image, and media file types can, and often do, include such hidden data & metadata. Much of it is automatically inserted during the file creation and processing.

Windows File Properties Viewer showing Owner and Computer properties

Windows users typically asses the risk involved by examining the file properties, by right-clicking on the file, selecting "Properties", and then selecting the "Details" tab. When they do, they find two alarming properties: "Owner" & "Computer". To prevent others from tracing the file back to them, they typically try to anonymize the file by using the "Remove Properties and Personal Information" feature that is accessible from the link at the bottom. They select the "Create a copy with all possible properties removed" option, only to find out that the new copy of the file, still have as properties the very same "Owner" & "Computer" they've been trying to remove. Next, they typically turn to the web, searching for a way to remove these properties, and attempt to do so with third-party properties removal tools they've found, but these do not help getting rid of these two properties either.

The reason that these "Owner" & "Computer" properties cannot be removed from a file is that they are not part of the file itself to begin with. These properties can be thought of as labels on a book shelf. If a book is taken out, the labels will not go along. Therefore, these properties are not a cause for concern when sharing files. The same is true for all the properties under the "File" section in the "Details" tab, including "Folder path", "Date created", and "Date modified", as well as all the information In the "General", "Security", and "Previous Versions" tabs.

That said, it's important to know that there could be, and often are, other properties and other types of hidden data that disclose the origin of the file and other harmful information, and are embedded within the file itself. The Windows Properties viewer does not shows most of them, and the "Remove Properties and Personal Information" feature does not removes most of them.

Therefore it's important to always clean every file before sharing it with others using a comprehensive hidden data & metadata remover, that has a broad-spectrum of supported hidden data & metadata types, regardless of the information shown by this properties viewer. One such tool is BatchPurifier™. BatchPurifier™ can permanently remove hidden data & metadata from multiple types of document, image, and media file formats, including Microsoft Office®, (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) LibreOffice®, PDF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG, AVI, WAV, MP3, and MP4. It's an offline privacy-oriented desktop application for Windows® that has a graphical user interface, (GUI) and supports the selective removal of more than 60 types of hidden data & metadata, including properties, comments, tracked changes, and slide notes.

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