PDFs remember who made them. The author field usually holds a real name or a company login, the producer field names the exact software and version, and the timestamps say when. For a document that's supposed to be anonymous, that's a lot of attribution.
This tool shows you every metadata field in your PDF, then writes a fresh copy with the identity fields emptied and timestamps normalized. It reopens its own output and reads every field back to confirm they're gone.
Loading tool…
This is PDF Metadata Viewer & Remover preconfigured for this task — open the full tool for every option.
Select a PDF. Document metadata is parsed and displayed locally.
Review fields: title, author, subject, keywords, creator, producer, dates.
Export a cleaned copy written as a fresh document.
The output is reopened and rescanned to confirm the fields are empty.
The cleaned output is reopened and every Info-dictionary field is read back; verification passes only when all identity fields are absent or empty.
Your word processor fills it in from your account or license name when exporting to PDF. Most people never see the field, which is exactly why it leaks.
No. The output is written as a fresh document rather than an incremental save, so old field values aren't lurking in the file's history.
Technical guidance for choosing settings and reviewing the result.
AI assistants are useful precisely because you give them your real documents — which is why the documents should be cleaned first. A practical pre-upload routine that runs entirely on your device.
7 min read · Reviewed July 2026
That 'anonymous' PDF probably has a name in it. What the Info dictionary stores, how producer strings fingerprint your software, and what metadata cleaning can and cannot fix.
6 min read · Reviewed July 2026