Does a Visual Studio debug build contain any personal information?

Question

I'm wondering about privacy and personal information that's contained in the debug files created by Visual Studio.

I have a project that I have compiled for both debug and release, and I have to zip basically the whole directory tree that contains the solution, the source, the pdbs, etc. and make it available.

I'm wondering what type of information will be released by doing this, other than source and binaries obviously.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Done correctly you will not release any personal information by doing this.

Things to watch out for:

• Sensitive information in paths. If you keep your source files in My Documents folder, your Windows user name will be leaked in .pdb files, as it embeds full source file paths. I recommend copying solution to directory c:\dev\project (or similar) and rebuilding there.

• Don't publish .suo, .user files, as these may contain sensitive information, and are generated by studio automatically for each user

• Look out for sensitive information that may be in app.config files

One more suggestion: don't publish any intermediate files (usually in obj directory). These will not help recipients in any way, but may contain personal information.