LibreOffice now removes personal data from documents. Why that matters

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I’ve been using LibreOffice since it was called StarOffice (and then OpenOffice). LibreOffice is a cross-platform, full-suite office app available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

It has one of the best UIs on the market, upholds standards, and offers many security and privacy features, including the option to digitally sign and/or password-protect documents, disable active contents for OLE Objects, DDE and OLE Automation, password protection recommendation, link blocking for untrusted locations, and warnings for saving, sending, printing, signing, and PDF creation.

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The latest release of LibreOffice (v 24.8) adds to those features: you can now strip personal information from your documents.

Wait, documents contain sensitive information? Yes: Even if you’re just writing a term paper and the document’s content isn’t private, there’s sensitive data attached to the file itself.

Document metadata can contain:

Track changes
Document user information
Author name and dates for comments (notes)
Document versioning information
Printer settings
Timestamps
Editing duration
Document template information

These examples might seem innocuous to some, but for others, sharing any unintended information is a big no-no. This is especially problematic given the collaborative nature of documents — you might not want other users to have access to that data. It could be helpful to someone creating a profile for nefarious purposes.

That’s why it’s wise to strip as much unnecessary information from documents as possible — and the developers behind LibreOffice have made it easy.

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Here’s how the new feature works.

How to strip metadata from LibreOffice files

What you’ll need: The only thing you’ll need for this is the most recent release of LibreOffice (v 24.8), which can be installed and used for free on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. I’ll demonstrate the process on Pop!_OS Linux, but it’s the same regardless of operating system.

The first thing to do is open LibreOffice. Depending on your OS, you will either have to open the LibreOffice Control Center or one of the different tools (Writer, Calc, Presents, etc).

Next, click the Tools menu and click Options to open the Settings pop-up. Click Security in the left sidebar and then, under Security Options and Warnings, click Options.

The LibreOffice Options window. — You’ll find tons of options to configure in LibreOffice.

Jack Wallen\ZDNET

In the resulting pop-up, click to enable the option for “Remove personal information on saving.”

You can choose to keep certain bits of data by clicking the associated radio button for options like “Keep track changes information.” Once you’ve done that, click OK in the pop-up, and then click OK in the Options window.

The LibreOffice Security Options window. — You can also configure other security options here.

Jack Wallen\ZDNET

Now, any time you save a document, LibreOffice will strip it of personal information so you can better trust the security and privacy of the files you share with other users.

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