Hi,

Many files contain hidden data, or metadata:

* JPEG and other image files often contain information about where a picture was taken and which camera was used.

* Office documents often contain information about their author, the date and time the document was created, as well as the complete changes history.

To help you remove those metadata, Tails include Metadata Cleaner, a tool to remove metadata in a wide range of file formats:

https://metadatacleaner.romainvigier.fr/

It is also available in Debian and on Flathub.

Unfortunately, the future of Metadata Cleaner is compromised: it has no active maintainer anymore. The codebase is healthy and up-to-date: as far as we know, no urgent code change is required at the moment. Nevertheless, a widely used free software project needs active maintenance work, for example to triage issues reported by users, to review contributions, to maintain healthy relationships with upstream & downstreams, and to fix in a timely manner any critical bug or security vulnerability that might be discovered. And sooner or later, deeper code work might be necessary for the tool to keep working with newer versions of its dependencies.

So we need at least 1 new co-maintainer to take over this duty.

Metadata Cleaner is a Python GTK application built on top of mat2, which does the heavy lifting of metadata cleanup. Fun fact: mat2 originates from MAT, which was created in 2011 as part of a Tails/Tor GSoC project (https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2).

"Metadata Cleaner amplifies the usefulness of mat2 by making it usable by the users who need it the most, with a familiar graphical user interface. It nicely complements mat2-web, because it does not require trusting an online service with one's metadata: with Metadata Cleaner, the processing happens locally. As such, it's a key component of the ecosystem that enables users to work safely with sensitive documents." says Julien Voisin, author of MAT and mat2, who volunteered to be the other co-maintainer.

If you want to become a co-maintainer of Metadata Cleaner, please get in touch at mat-dev@boum.org (public mailing list).

Thanks in advance, and many thanks to Romain Vigier for creating Metadata Cleaner!