THE San Fernando Valley has always gotten a bad rap. For years, it has been associated with two dubious cultural phenomena: Valley Girls and pornography. But just as the city of Los Angeles has undergone a process of rediscovery in long-neglected regions like the downtown area, so this suburban outpost across the Santa Monica mountains has also experienced an image makeover.
When the New England Journal of Medicine used a word-processing function to discover that Merck & Co. had deleted study data about Vioxx and heart attacks, Merck joined a long line of organizations bitten by information lurking in electronic files.
It also has happened to the White House, the Pentagon, the British prime minister's office and the United Nations.
Each time, making minor electronic adjustments to documents turned up details not meant for public disclosure - such as the true author of a file or sensitive data removed from a final draft.
The pitfalls of such hidden "metadata" have been long known in computer-savvy circles, but these high-profile leaks are driving new efforts to keep a lid on metadata.
So sensitive is the topic for the U.S. government that the National Security Agency released guidance in December on how agencies can properly redact reports.
For the corporate world, several companies are successfully selling tools to automatically scan for and remove metadata.
Metadata is data about data. A word-processing document, for instance, has metadata on who authored it, when someone saved it and what that person did to it. Microsoft Corp.'s Word has a "track changes" feature that preserves a file's original text and shows another person's edits. All that is metadata.
This information is designed to remain because it can help people organize their files and collaborate with one another.
But because it does not show up when a document is printed and does not appear on screen in normal settings, it is easy to forget about it.
Fears about the hazards of metadata led Microsoft to pull back on a planned feature in Vista, the new Windows operating system. Originally, Vista was going to let users drag and drop files into certain spots on the desktop to label documents with personalized categories. Grouping files by category is more laborious.
Vista testers told Microsoft that it might become "a little too easy" to apply the categories and have them stick permanently to the document, said Mike Burk, a Windows product manager. That could get ugly if a file categorized in "projects I hate" were e-mailed, say, to a boss.
The next generation of Microsoft's widely used Office software, which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, will make it simpler to strip metadata from files before they are disseminated.
Even so, Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Inc., says that the problem will remain - metadata will exist in documents unless users make a point of getting rid of it.
So it was not surprising that when the White House posted a policy paper about strategy in Iraq last year, a quick command showed the author. What was important was that it was written outside the administration, by Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University and an adviser to the National Security Council.
Before posting a report in Adobe Systems Inc.'s Portable Document Format about a U.S. soldier who had accidentally killed an Italian secret-service agent in Iraq, officials covered up classified information with black bars. But there is a difference between covering and deleting information. Readers simply uncloaked the text by cutting it from under the black and pasting it elsewhere.
Automated tools to help protect against metadata releases have existed for a while, but they are beginning to see wider use.
For example, Workshare Inc. sells a product called Trace that scans documents for metadata and ranks the findings by risk level. One way a high risk is assigned is when a document lists all its authors and storage locations, because such data can guide hackers.
For most of Workshare's six years in existence, the company's customers were primarily lawyers. In the past year, Workshare has seen business expand to 60 percent of the Fortune 1000, said CEO Joe Fantuzzi. Revenue has surpassed $25 million, and Fantuzzi said that metadata protection is on the verge of being a must-have for corporate-technology buyers.
Of course, wider use of metadata-scanning tools will reduce the juicy finds that have benefited journalists and others.
Richard M. Smith, a computer-privacy expert at Boston Software Forensics, mined metadata to determine who in the British prime minister's office worked on a 2003 dossier on Iraq.
Even in a world more attuned to the perils of metadata, however, Smith says that the material will not dry up. "There are simply too many people who work in governments around the world and there is no way to educate them all about metadata," he wrote in an e-mail. "I expect to see a steady stream of slip-ups in the future."
