Metadata Anonymisation Tool Wrapper

A simple way to remove metadata that may be a privacy concern from some file types using Pantheon Files. To work it is necessary to have the mat tool installed (sudo apt install mat). This package provides a suitable contractor file as well as changing the default action of mat. When installed you will find that the context menu in Pantheon Files shows an extra entry when one or more file items has been selected. Clicking on this option results in a new files being created with the ".stripped" extension that have the same content as the selected files but with metadata removed. The advantage of this is that both files are then thumbnailed in Files and only one action is required to remove the stripped file. The wrapper will not proceed if it detects that a file would be overwritten.

The functionality of this wrapper is limited by mat which is the tool in the Ubuntu Bionic repository. Bear in mind the warnings given in mat documentation regarding the extent of anonymisation, which is not 100% perfect.

When elementaryos is rebased on a distibution that contains the later version of the tool mat2 then this wrapper will be updated to use that.

The contractor will be shown for these file types:

• .png and .jpeg images
• .odf and .docx documents
• .tar, .gzip and .zip archive files
• .mpeg, .mp2, .mp4, ,flac audio files
• .torrent files

The tool can also be used from the command line: com.github.jeremypw.mat-wrapper [FILES]

The flag "--no-rename" may be used to restore the native renaming of the mat tool. That is, after stripping, the original file is given a ".bak" extension and the stripped file takes the original file name.

For more functionality it is possible to run the mat tool directly or with the mat-gui app. Type mat --help at the command line for further information.

Building from source

Dependencies

These dependencies must be present before building

• valac
• meson
• glib-2.0
• gtk+3.0
• granite

You can install these on a Ubuntu-based system by executing this command:

sudo apt install valac meson libgranite-dev

To build

meson build --prefix=/usr  --buildtype=release
cd build
ninja

To install

sudo ninja install