I sometimes pull PDF's off the intranet at work and forward them to clients. We're not supposed to do this even though the documents are public information. I do it because our public website is extremely hard to navigate.
Would it be possible for my employer to embed personal information showing who saved or created the PDF file?
What I'm afraid of is hidden data in the PDF that says something to the effect of:
[b][i]Saved by John Doe at 2:55pm on 11-10-2008, from computer EENG123, from network location F:/pdf/sample.pdf.[/i][/b]
Can this type of information be applied to a document, without me knowing or having any way of preventing it?
If the PDF exists on your intranet as a secured PDF with no form-editing options enabled, then you can't insert any new data just by opening it, either in Reader or Acrobat.
If it's a PDF and not secured, it's possible that someone could attach a document Javascript to update the metadata each time the document is opened, but Acrobat is really picky about security of login details, so it would have a next-to-impossible job recording the info you used as a sample.
however, if the PDF is generated on demand, or served through an intranet web page by a CGI script, then the server can add whatever it wants to. We use that principle all the time to stamp license info into downloaded ebooks.