Clean your files before you hit send: a 30-second habit
Say a consultant — we'll call her Priya — works from home a few days a week and sends proposals, spreadsheets and decks to clients all day long. One afternoon she sends a proposal with the client's competitor still visible in a tracked change she thought she'd removed, and a comment to herself that read "lowball them if they push." The document looked finished. It wasn't.
You don't need a data breach to leak information. You just need to send a file that remembers more than you meant it to.
What tends to ride along
- Tracked changes and comments — the edits and notes you thought were gone.
- Author and company metadata — your name, your machine, timestamps.
- Hidden text and earlier revisions inside documents.
- GPS and camera data in any embedded photos.
- Invisible characters pasted in from templates or the web.
The habit
Make "check before send" a reflex, the same way you'd proofread. Drop the file — or a whole folder — into scrub. It reads everything on your own device, nothing uploaded, and gives each file a plain Clean or Suspicious verdict with exactly what it found. Thirty seconds, and you know the file says only what you want it to.
For documents (Word, PDF), scrub shows you what to strip so you can send a clean export. For images and text, one click removes the metadata and hidden characters for you — and re-checks to confirm they're gone.
The short version
Remote work means a lot of files going to a lot of people. A quick check before send is the cheapest insurance there is. Get scrub free — it even scans a whole folder at once.