How to See Who Made a PDF (And What Yours Says About You)

Open the Properties panel on almost any PDF and you will see a name. Not the file name — a person's name, sitting in a field called Author. It got there because the program that made the file put it there. The person who sent you the file almost certainly does not know it is in there.

The same is true of the PDFs you send.

What a PDF Actually Stores About You

Every PDF carries an information dictionary. It holds eight standard fields, and they are written automatically at the moment the file is saved.

FieldWhat is usually in itAuthorThe name registered to the copy of Word, Pages or Acrobat that made the fileTitleOften the first heading, or the original file name from a templateSubjectUsually empty, sometimes a leftover descriptionKeywordsUsually empty, occasionally carried over from a templateCreatorThe program the document was written in — Microsoft Word, InDesign, PagesProducerThe program that wrote the final PDF, often with its exact version numberCreationDateWhen the file was first madeModDateWhen it was last saved

There is usually a second copy of the same information as well, in a block called the XMP packet. It is stored separately from the eight fields above, which is why clearing the fields in one program sometimes leaves the old values behind in another.

Why the Author Field Is Usually a Real Name

Word takes the Author name from the account the software was set up with. If that was a personal Microsoft account, the field holds your legal name. If it was a work machine, it holds whatever your employer registered.

The more common surprise is a name that is not yours at all. Templates carry their metadata with them. Download a resume template, a contract template or an invoice template, fill it in and export it, and the Author field can still hold the name of whoever built the template. Same for a document a colleague started and you finished.

When This Actually Matters

• Resumes. A hiring manager can open Properties in one click. If the Author field names someone else, the obvious reading is that someone else wrote it.
• Quotes and proposals sent to clients. The Creator field names your software stack. The Title field sometimes still holds the previous client's name, because the file started life as their proposal.
• Anything sent anonymously. A complaint, a tip, a report. The Author field defeats the anonymity before anyone reads a word of the content.
• Dates that contradict the story. CreationDate and ModDate are timestamps. If the document was supposed to have been written last month, they say otherwise.

How to Check a PDF Yourself

On a Mac, open the file in Preview and choose Tools, then Show Inspector. In Acrobat, it is File, then Properties. On Windows, right-click the file, choose Properties, then the Details tab.

You can also drop the file into our reader and see all eight fields at once. It reads the file in your browser and shows you what is in there for free, with no account. Nothing is uploaded.

What This Is Not

PDF metadata is not tracking. Nobody is notified when the file is opened. There is no beacon and no phone-home. It is a set of text fields written once, at save time, and carried along with the file.

It is also not hidden. Anyone who receives the file can read it in about three seconds, using software they already have. That is the whole problem — not that it is secret, but that the sender does not know it is there and the recipient does.

How to Clear It

If you made the document in Word, the Document Inspector under File, Info will strip personal information before you export. That works, and it is worth using. It does not help with a PDF you received, a PDF you made somewhere else, or a PDF you exported before you thought about it.

For those, the fields have to be cleared in the PDF itself — all eight of them, plus the XMP packet, plus any per-page metadata blocks. Our tool does all three in your browser. The file never leaves your machine, which matters here more than usual: the documents most worth cleaning are contracts, resumes and filings, and those are the last files anyone should be uploading to a stranger's server to have them cleaned.

One thing to watch for afterwards. Many PDF tools write their own name into the Producer field when they save your file. You clean the document, and the tool signs it on the way out. Check the file again after any tool touches it.

Keep going

• Remove PDF Metadata — read all eight fields free, clear them in your browser
• The Photo You Just Posted Knows Where You Live — the same problem in images, with GPS coordinates attached
• Remove Image Metadata — strip EXIF and location data from photos
• Why Blacking Out Text in a PDF Doesn't Actually Hide It — the other thing a PDF keeps after you think you removed it
• Black Out Text in a PDF — remove the content, not just cover it