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Metadata and other fun hotwords

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by alxcsby 1 view

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I've noticed here in our little legal system, the word "Metadata" has become quite the buzz. Being a techish person, it bothered me to never have heard of that phrase. It seemed pretty intuitive, so I looked it up. It's "Data about data."
The big stir here in the legal field is getting rid of it and covering it up.
Fine, CYA, but is it really important? Let's remember the people who would be "scrubbing" their metadata are the same people who have been known to dump their C: drive onto my physical server when their screen resolution changed.
Anybody else hearing a lot about this? What's the general opinion?
Incidentally, it seems several little companies have popped up to offer "email scrubbers" specifically in the legal field.
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After a little looking about, yes it does seem that this stuff has an established history of being a gremlin in legal situations, and it looks as though the specific issue is Microsoft products.

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by Former member

There are programs that will sterilize your hard drive and render the meta data unreadable, even if slaved to another computer or OS.

The one that comes to mind is Evidence Eliminator. The problem that I found with these types of programs is that if your OS crashes, you will have to reinstall; computer forensics are next to impossible.

Do you need it, it depends on what you do with your computers. If you do questionable things with your computers or work in a high security environment, then you might need it; just make sure you have a good back up beforehand.

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