track changes issue heard on radio this morning

[Guest]

Here's what I received from a City Attorney this morning:
"Pat, I heard on the news that there is a problem with confidentiality and the Track function in word. My understanding of the issue is that anyone can access "all" internal changes in a document and date/person information when made. The news indicated that there was an upgrade that could be downloaded at no cost from Microsoft. This is particularly important for legal documents, etc. I use this function often and would like it upgraded. Please contact Penie for follow up on this. Thanks, "

I've been looking all morning trying to find out where this was updated so I can let the user know our daily Windows Updates takes care of this.
Regards

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Pat,

"Track changes" is supposed to track changes you made, so it shouldn't be a
surprise that unless you reject or accept those changes, anybody can see
those changes.

I guess what the City Attormey referred to is
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...ED-D43E-42CA-BC7B-5446D34E5360&displaylang=en

It's an add-in that allows you to save a "stripped-down" version of a
document... without tracked changes, and without a lot of other private
information that may be stored inside a document without you being aware of
it.

Such "meta data" is always a two-edged sword. Usually you want to have as
much meta data as possible. For example, lots of document properties might
help you keep track of the status of a document, of the person responsible
for the content, the names of reviewers, the company and group they are
working for, the mail address of the person that sent you the file, and so
on. You may also want to have a versioning scheme, and info on other stats
("draft", "final", "confidential", "client", "purpose" ...), and on and on.
As soon as you publish the document somewhere, or send it to a customer, any
of those informations may be compromising. So it may make sense to try to
strip all "metadata" from the doc.

The add-in mentioned above does that, for several kinds of "hidden" data
that may occur in a doc. There seem to be some problems with large and
complex documents, though. But since you should keep the original document
with all the meta data anyway, it's not very risky to just try if it works
for you.
If the add-in hangs after saving the cleaned doc, I wouldn't trust the saved
file, since it may well be corrupt.

Greetings,
Klaus

 

[Klaus Linke]

without a lot of other private information that may be stored

inside a document without you being aware of it.

(Two of which are hidden text and comments. Others are listed in the readme
for the add-in)