Kim Commando

And so here's what's going on is that if you are using like one of these online services, like a free online resume builder that requires an account, a recruitment platform that generates the PDFs for you,

any service that emails your resume as a PDF attachment, that these trackers could be inside that file.

And it can tell the potential employer through this pixel whenever you have opened that file, the device that you use, your location, if you have forwarded.

Some of these systems can actually see if you sent the same resume to competing companies.

So if you applied at both Google and Microsoft with the same resume, they might both know that.

It's pretty tough.

If you did not create the PDF of your resume yourself, say using Microsoft Word, Google Docs, just assume that it's being tracked.

To strip out the trackers, you can print to a PDF.

So basically, you open up the resume, you hit print, but under options, you select save as PDF instead of printing it.

This creates a clean copy without any of those embedded secret trackers.

Not exactly, because these are invisible little dots inside the resume.

So you have to just assume that if you did not create this PDF yourself and you used one of these words,

online resume builders or recruitment platform, that those invisible trackers might be in there.

And it's telling potential employers a lot about your job history and what you're looking for right now.

Oh my gosh.

So many of us are using ChatGPT like a free filing cabinet and a second brain.

But what happens if, for example, you hit the wrong button and then you lose months of work?

Or in this case, a professor lost over two years of work when he was experimenting with simply the settings of

and disabled data sharing.

It wiped out his entire chat history.