Reality Winner's 2017 arrest is usually told as a printer-tracking-dots story — but that's a different risk layer than the metadata inside a Word, PDF, or photo file. What journalists' own security guidance says about each layer, and where a browser-based scrubber like NearScrub actually reaches.
A docx/xlsx/pptx file hides metadata in three separate XML parts — core.xml, app.xml, and custom.xml — each holding something different, plus tracked changes and comments that none of them touch. What each part actually stores, and what NearScrub can and can't clear.
Three real, documented cases of metadata exposure — John McAfee's 2012 arrest via EXIF GPS, Adam Savage's 2010 geotagged home-address tweet, and the UK's 2003 "dodgy dossier" author metadata leak — and what to check before sharing your own photos or documents.
NearScrub has no server and no other users, but its file parser still had to be hardened against malformed and malicious input. Two real fixes from scrub-core.js: an unsigned-length coercion for PNG chunks, and a declared-size budget that rejects zip bombs before decompression starts.