[Tips] Scrub Your Personal Information Off the File Properties in Windows 7

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The feature is actually not new in Windows 7. It’s been there since Windows Vista but I didn’t notice that until now.

Assuming you have a document you are working on and want to share with someone, sometimes you might want to remove some of the file’s properties, especially when the file contains personal information. It’s just embarrassing, for example, if some of the words in the tags property reveal some of the secret you don’t want others to know.

The properties in a file are vary depending on what the type of the file is. For example, a word document contains a lot more properties than a plain txt file. To find out what properties the file contains, just right-click the file and then choose Properties, the “Details” tab contains all the properties available in the target file.

image15 - [Tips] Scrub Your Personal Information Off the File Properties in Windows 7

And to remove the properties you find you don’t want to share with others, just click the blue link at the bottom of the properties window.

image16 - [Tips] Scrub Your Personal Information Off the File Properties in Windows 7

And then you can choose which properties you want to remove, with or without making a copy of them.

That’s it, it’s just that simple to scrub these information off the file properties without involving any 3rd party tools.

However, the feature is still quite limited that it only removes the properties that were added using Windows. If you added properties using a different program, you must remove those properties using that program. For example, if you want to scrub the complete properties including the revisions and comments off a MS Word document,  you may need a tool or use native MS Word to do that. This little tip won’t be much helpful in that case.

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