I have spoken on multiple occasions to attorneys about the dangers of metadata. I have found that many attorneys are not aware of the problem and do not know how to follow simple steps to manage metadata.

I was completely stunned, however, by this post which describes a business plan that was submitted to a venture capitalist with all of the tracked changes and comments intact. This is not a situation in which someone used a metadata viewer to mine the document for unscrubbed changes. No, this is one where the author never bothered to accept the changes and they they appeared when the document was opened. Some of my favorite comments:

“When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them”

“I’d delete this section since we don’t have these features on the roadmap and haven’t figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won’t catch this.”

“VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard.”

(Hat tip to mathewingram.com for the link.)