This is not that Mat Kool Ice Cream we’re talking about. But this is much cooler than ice cream. But first thing first, what is metadata?
From The MAT Website:
“Metadata consists of information that characterizes data (e.g. Word documents, pictures, music files, etc). In essence, metadata answers who, what, when, where, why, and how about every facet of the data that is being characterized.”
As an example, your phone’s camera took pictures. But it is not just a plain picture. In the picture itself it contained such informations like when the picture was taken, what type of camera was used, and if you’ve enabled geo-location tag, it will record your location too.
This is where Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit (MAT) comes in handy. So what is MAT? MAT is a toolbox composed of a GUI application, a CLI application and a library.
Because you don’t want to let everybody know about you on the web, or any case that matter. MAT can help you remove those metadata from your files such as pictures, word document, PDF and etc. Unfortunately it can’t anonymise their content, or steganography, watermarks and any kind of overly customized metadata.
These are the formats that is supported by MAT:
- Portable Network Graphics (.png)
- JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg, …)
- Open Documents (.odt, .odx, .ods, …)
- Office OpenXml (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, …)
- Portable Document Fileformat (.pdf)
- Tape ARchives (.tar, .tar.bz2, …)
- MPEG AUdio (.mp3, .mp2, .mp1, …)
- Ogg Vorbis (.ogg, …)
- Free Lossless Audio Codec (.flac)
- Torrent (.torrent)