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The other day I visited LinkedIn to refresh my memory of a person I’d met some time ago. Unfortunately, their photo was so small I could not make out their face, so I did a quick Google Images search to see if I could find a better photo of them. I was surprised to find that Google’s new Image Search now displays the actual filename of the image when you hover over it. Unfortunately in this case, the filename was less than flattering. I’m sure my colleague was not expecting this filename to be presented to the world!

This got me thinking about the digital fragments we leave behind every day, unaware that other people can actually see them. I went looking for information about this and found a slew of articles from the computer forensics world on the field of “steganalysis” (from the Greek name, “steganos” [hidden or secret] and “graphy” [writing or drawing], which literally means “hidden writing.”)

Good to know, but I’ll leave steganalysis to the funky computer forensics techs on the TV cop shows – I just wanted to be able to track down my own digital bits and pieces to avoid potential embarrassment.

So after a little more study, I’ve come up with some things you may want to watch out for and perhaps handle a little bit more carefully:

Photo and Image Filenames
As my opening example illustrated, poor file naming can have unintended consequences.

To protect the identity of my colleague, I found the example at right that shows a similarly embarrassing filename for tennis star, Andy Roddick. This photo was found using the search term “cross eyed” in Google Images.

Naming image files properly to avoid embarrassing revelations serves another purpose as well:  file names are findable by search engines, and naming them correctly and relevantly will support your search engine optimization strategy.

Document Properties in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint
Metadata (data about data) is helpful in organizing information (The Dewey Decimal System is an example of metadata), but in the digital world metadata also is created in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in a feature called “Properties.”

Document properties include details such as author name, title, subject, keywords, category, status, comments, revision number, and total editing time.

A great article entitled “E-Discovery Update:  Controlling the Accidental Release of Digital Information” describes an embarrassing outcome from not checking the properties of a Word document. A law firm represented a complex contract as their own work and submitted many hours of billable time. The document properties revealed that it was created for a different client, by a different law firm, and that it had only been opened twice and edited for a total of 35 minutes in the past six months!

To view document properties or inspect the document:
Quick Access Toolbar > Prepare > Properties

On the subject of PowerPoint, it also is worth remembering that slide notes may not always be desirable to share. If you send a PowerPoint file to someone or share it on SlideShare or Google Presentations, make sure you delete any slide notes you don’t want made public.

More Information in Digital Photos and Images
Metadata also is contained in photos. Some digital cameras include GPS location information of where the photo was taken! Revealing this information can extend beyond embarrassment as described in (PDF) “Removing Hidden Patient Data from Digital Images in PowerPoint” where clinical photos copied into a PowerPoint presentation that was to be submitted to a healthcare conference were found to contain patients’ names and identification.

For more information on detecting and removing metadata from photos, see How To Remove MetaData from Photos (Windows).

Redacting and Searchable PDFs
Redacting a document is the act of blacking out words in a document that should not be revealed to a wider audience.

Although there are Word redaction tools out there, some people think the same can be accomplished by using a black highlighter in Word over the sensitive phrase(s) and then outputting the document as a PDF.

Unfortunately, creating a PDF from a Word file does not “erase” the underlying data. I tested this by inserting my name into a Word document, “redacting” using the black highlighter, and then outputting the document as a PDF. Then I searched for my name and both instances of my name were returned in the results. To overcome this, a PDF can have its metadata reduced if it is rendered without embedded searchable text. The resulting PDF acts more like a digital photograph of the document than the editable, original native version.

Track Changes in Word
Track changes is a handy feature in Word to enable several people to edit the same document. Unfortunately, all edits and comments remain findable until all changes are accepted in the document. Selecting “Final Showing Markup” displays your document as if you had accepted all the tracked changes. It hides (but does not remove) the tracked changes.

If you turn off the display of tracked changes, it doesn’t mean they’re not there. They are simply hidden. Anyone could open your document and choose to view your tracked changes. To ensure others do not see comments or edits, finalize the document using the Accept feature.

To accept changes:  Review > Accept

Images Posted on Networking/Sharing/ Bookmarking Sites
Another Google Images search revealed this screen capture I created and saved to my Diigo account (Diigo is a bookmarking service like Delicious that allows you to save bits of web sites vs. entire pages).

Similarly, images you post on social networking sites appear to be fair game for Google to index. In the example of my business colleague, not only was there the less-than-flattering filename problem, the photo presented in Google Images was harvested from Facebook, whose content is thought to be only available to “friends.” Even though the filename was obscure, the photo was ascribed to this person by way of their Facebook account name.

Lastly (A Related Item)
I’ve often experienced people using previous emails to start a new email and leaving the subject line unchanged. This confuses the recipient when they first receive the email and makes it difficult to find the email later. Sometimes the subject line is so “lite” it might inadvertently get emails so titled deleted along with their important message content. Consider having a serious email exchange under the subject “Congratulations to XYZ on their new baby!”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Digital Marketing, Web Writing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: digital information, digital photos, document properties, file naming, hidden data, metadata, steganalysis, track changes

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