this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
17 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy Guides

16784 readers
42 users here now

In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.

This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.


You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Learn more...


Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!

Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!


This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.


Moderation Rules:

  1. We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
  2. This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
  3. No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
  4. Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
  5. Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
  6. Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
  7. News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
  8. Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
  9. No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
  10. No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
  11. Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
  12. General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.

Additional Resources:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I've been using mat2, which is the first recommended option on PrivacyGuides.com, to remove metadata. Is there any drawback to this compared to ExifTool, which is at the bottom of the page? mat2 relies on ExifTool, but only for removing metadata that isn't a PDF, audio file, image, svg, or video. I usually use mat2 for videos, which utilizes FFmpeg to remove metadata. I don't think ExifTool uses FFppeg, but I could be wrong.

One weird thing, I probably shouldn't, but I still use ExifCleaner, which is an outdated Electron-based drag-and-drop metadata removal tool. After I run a video through mat2 and then through ExifCleaner, ExifCleaner says there were 60 metadata entries on the video file, but it reduces it to 59. This means mat2 seems to not remove all possible metadata.

top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I haven’t used either tool but some metadata isn’t privacy related. Properties such as video size, video codec, audio codec, etc are important for playback.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Exiftool will only process images, so not things like PDF.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

For my personal use, the only drawback of mat2 is that for PDFs it turns pages into PNGs (https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2/-/blob/master/libmat2/pdf.py), so you lose the OCR layer/searchable text from the original file. Since ExifTool changes to PDF metadata are reversible if you don't linearize them (https://exiftool.org/TagNames/PDF.html), now I just use this script to safely clean and keep the output file searchable: https://gist.github.com/sneakers-the-rat/172e8679b824a3871decd262ed3f59c6.

I guess you could compare the output files from mat2 and ExifTool using the fc or diff commands, to find out what's the difference