I had a request to share a simple spreadsheet for music practice. Something I can throw together quickly.
Unfortunately I’m reliant on Android and Google Sheets and Docs for these mundane tasks. My phone and Tablet replaced my laptop several years ago.
How dangerous is the Metadata? Can it accurately be extracted from Google Sheets and Docs? (at least for casual Consumers. Law Enforcement has deeper probes and scans)
I don’t want a spreadsheet revealing my house on Street View or my registered Google Account.
This was a problem in Ms Office too. Even 25 years ago Office 97 hid a lot of metadata in our Staff’s documents. IIRC by 1999 the Mac Address was tracked and logged in documents and Spreadsheets.
I would use the Export file function to share Sheets out of Google. Protecting my Google Account name is very important.
Google Sheets is useful for small teams within an office. Sharing and updating works. I can’t recall a situation where one data update got lost. Record locking in a database is extremely good. Sheets is low volume. We don’t have 18 people entering Time Cards into a spreadsheet form any more. (I implemented that to get rid of filling out paper time sheets. Staff opened the Sheet, queried their ID, and filled out any leave or sick time they used.) Our site level HR software eventually replaced my modest contribution.
It’s interesting Google considers user entered labels meta data. Obviously the Company name, a project ID, project date, and project leader, labels are going to be visible within the Google library. I wouldn’t enter any of that on a personal document.
For Chrome on a PC. There should be something similar for Android phone browsers.
I don’t mind sharing a file that can help someone. I just have to be careful in the Digital world. So many people innocently shared family backyard and vacation photos and revealed their location to the entire world.
I’d be more concerned about Google’s ability to delete your content at will with no warning:
Not that I’m sure sure your musical notation is exactly that category of controversial content (but hey no judgment )
But they have been deleting other types of controversial content too for political, etc. reasons, though I can’t find a cite immediately.
How concerned I’d be would depend on whether docs were anything that could be considered “controversial” (or mistaken for such by an AI) and how devastating it would be if they were suddenly irreversibly deleted with no warning.
I learned decades ago to never trust digital documents. I remember using a x86-64 disassembler in the late1980’s to hack early copy protection. The comments programmers left inside code was often quite interesting.
I am thankful for Google Docs and Sheets.
I don’t want to maintain a Linux box for Open Office. I don’t have enough personal documents to make it worthwhile.
I absolutely refuse to be held hostage by Microsoft Subscription software. Especially for a couple dozen personal docs and spreadsheets.
It doesn’t take explicit content. A number of services that have run their life and are no longer worth maintaining have been shut by their owners, or converted to paid services, especially “we store your photos” sites. I wonder when the proverbial fan gets hit and the many providers of free email will decide they would rather charge money for the service. Definitely a major problem in the future.
The most insidious piece of metadata I recall was that MS Office (word) would retain the content of deleted segments of a document many years ago… supposedly for the ability to undo changes. A co-worker applied a utility to look at these hidden bits of some documents, including a corporate directive. It appears a few of the team working on the document had waxed sarcastic about the policy, before “deleting” (they thought) the comments and sending the document up the ladder for approval.
Yes you do not want your google ID out in the wild, as it is also likely the email address spammers are looking for.
I remember venting at work. Our benefits manager got a bug up his butt about auditing some data. Data I was already auditing with reports and doing manual corrections. I wasn’t hired for data entry, but I got stuck with the corrections.
I used some uh, rather colorful and descriptive comments in the code.
I did remove them a couple days later after venting. But, yeah the code landed somewhere on the Site’s magnetic tape daily, incremental backup.
Early career. I didn’t let the job get to me like that later.
As programmers we’re accustomed to using files as scratch pads. Store debug data, results of data comparisons. I had a job abort counter field in a master file. I wanted to know how many emergency calls that batch job created. How much misery was that batch job costing me in sleep?
We forget our public consumers now have tools to snoop into our work. Chrome can show html with a mouse click.
Metadata is worse. Calling someone a SOB inside code is bad. But Google leaving a breadcrumb trail to Street View is just mean and potentially life threatening. Doxxing is terrifying.
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