Marshall Brain's Blog

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So you've just emailed a copy of your Microsoft Word document out to a hundred people who need to see it. The document contained some confidential material in an early draft, but you deleted it. Now it turns out that the confidential material may still be in the document. This article describes one scenario:

Document shows SCO prepped lawsuit against BofA

According to the article:

A feature in the word-processing software tracks changes to documents, who made those changes, and when they were made. These notations typically are invisible to someone reading a Word document. But as some lawyers, businesspeople and politicians have learned the hard way, Word can also display so-called metadata in the document--including the original version and all subsequent changes. This information is available by viewing the document under "original showing markup" or "final showing markup."

It's a fascinating article, and something to think about before you release an actual Word document via email.