Article from BBC (English)

One of the advantages of Free/Open Source Software which is becoming more and more apparent is transparency, which gives users the freedom to know exactly what is happening when they use an application. The advantage of this property is highlighted in a recent article from the BBC on the hidden dangers of MS Word documents. While Free Software is not necessarily immune to this sort of occurence, at least the community of programmers is free to make changes to eliminate the problem; whereas users of closed source programs are at the mercy of the supplier, who may or may not decide to make a change in the offending code.

In what was probably the most embarrassing recent incident involving hidden information, the UK government had a lot to explain concerning the release of a plagiarized document known as the Iraq "dodgy dossier". The UK government has since abandoned the use of MS Word in favor of Adobe Acrobat, which is less prone to propagating unknown sensitive information.

This article also has several interesting links on the right sidebar, including downloads which will enable you to search your own Word documents for hidden data, accounts of known incidents, and utilities to scrub your own documents.

If you are a user of Microsoft Word, please make use of these resources and insure that any documents you send out from your computer do not contain information that you would like to keep to yourself. As the article points out, it could save you a lot of trouble.

Willy Smith, reporting from Costa Rica