README.md

 _____ _____ _____ ___
|     |  _  |_   _|_  |  Keep your data,
| | | | |_| | | | |  _|     trash your meta!
|_|_|_|_| |_| |_| |___|

Metadata and privacy

Metadata consist of information that characterizes data. Metadata are used to provide documentation for data products. In essence, metadata answer who, what, when, where, why, and how about every facet of the data that are being documented.

Metadata within a file can tell a lot about you. Cameras record data about when a picture was taken and what camera was used. Office documents like PDF or Office automatically adds author and company information to documents and spreadsheets. Maybe you don't want to disclose those information.

This is precisely the job of mat2: getting rid, as much as possible, of metadata.

mat2 provides:

• a library called libmat2;
• a command line tool called mat2,
• a service menu for Dolphin, KDE's default file manager

If you prefer a regular graphical user interface, you might be interested in Metadata Cleaner, which is using mat2 under the hood.

Requirements

• python3-mutagen for audio support
• python3-gi-cairo and gir1.2-poppler-0.18 for PDF support
• gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0 for images support
• gir1.2-rsvg-2.0 for svg support
• FFmpeg, optionally, for video support
• libimage-exiftool-perl for everything else
• bubblewrap, optionally, for sandboxing

Please note that mat2 requires at least Python3.5.

Requirements setup on macOS (OS X) using Homebrew

brew install exiftool cairo pygobject3 poppler gdk-pixbuf librsvg ffmpeg

Running the test suite

$ python3 -m unittest discover -v

And if you want to see the coverage:

$ python3-coverage run --branch -m unittest discover -s tests/
$ python3-coverage report --include -m --include /libmat2/*'

How to use mat2

usage: mat2 [-h] [-V] [--unknown-members policy] [--inplace] [--no-sandbox]
            [-v] [-l] [--check-dependencies] [-L | -s]
            [files [files ...]]

Metadata anonymisation toolkit 2

positional arguments:
  files                 the files to process

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -V, --verbose         show more verbose status information
  --unknown-members policy
                        how to handle unknown members of archive-style files
                        (policy should be one of: abort, omit, keep) [Default:
                        abort]
  --inplace             clean in place, without backup
  --no-sandbox          Disable bubblewrap's sandboxing
  -v, --version         show program's version number and exit
  -l, --list            list all supported fileformats
  --check-dependencies  check if mat2 has all the dependencies it needs
  -L, --lightweight     remove SOME metadata
  -s, --show            list harmful metadata detectable by mat2 without
                        removing them

Note that mat2 will not clean files in-place, but will produce, for example, with a file named "myfile.png" a cleaned version named "myfile.cleaned.png".