Why your PDF still has your name in it

Where the data comes from

Whatever produced the file wrote it. A word processor fills in your name from the account you were signed into, and its own name as the producer. A scanner or phone app fills in its own. A conversion tool from a web service often fills in its own name and the date it ran.

This happens whether or not you chose it, which is why documents that look entirely anonymous frequently are not.

What is actually recorded

• Author — frequently your real name, taken from the software's account settings
• Producer or creator — the application that generated the file, often with a version number
• Creation and modification dates — when the file was made and last saved
• Title and subject — occasionally populated from your document's own headings
• Software history — enough to infer your workflow, and sometimes your employer

Checking a document before you send it

1. Open the PDF in a metadata viewer.
2. Read the fields it reports. Empty fields mean the file does not record them.
3. Note anything you would not want a recipient to read.

This takes a few seconds and is worth doing on any document going outside your organisation — a CV, a contract, a proposal, anything attached to a job application.

What to do about it

The reliable approach is to rewrite the document with the metadata fields emptied. Unlike image metadata, which can be dropped by re-encoding the picture, a PDF's metadata is a set of fields you can clear directly.

An honest caveat about "cleaning"

Metadata removal produces a new file. The original still carries the data, so decide which one you keep. If you overwrite your copy with the cleaned version and delete the original, the information is gone from your side too — which is usually what you want, but it does mean the original is unrecoverable.

If you need to keep an untouched original for your records, store it somewhere private rather than emailing it to yourself. An email attachment is a copy in someone else's system.

Related

• Read the metadata in a PDF
• Remove metadata from photos
• Remove location data from a photo
• Compress a PDF