By annotating PDFs you leave metadata along with the annotation content like your name and the date and time when you created and last modified each annotation. This metadata can be seen and exploited by anyone with access to the annotated PDF file.
That way, others could for instance infer how long you took to read through and comment on a document and even individual pages, or infer when you made breaks or did something else.
pdf-slashannots aims at redacting that annotation metadata from PDFs so that you can pass them along without revealing your habits.
pdf-slashannots is available on PyPI:
python3 -m pip install pdf-slashannots
Simply run pdf-slashannots input.pdf redacted.pdf and you are done.
Okay, there is more. If you run the command without any options then all
annotations are equally redacted and the dates set to none precision (January
1st, 1970).
Check out pdf-slashannots --help for the more advanced
features like
- specify a subset of annotation authors to redact
- specify the precision to which the dates are reduced
- redact also the authors' name
Or, if you prefer a graphical interface, there is also pdf-slashannots-gui
based on Python Tkinter.