That’s the question really. I hear the terms metadata and torrents thrown around all the time when talking about internet and privacy, but I don’t really understand them and when I tried googling torrents I was just confused. Can someone explain one or both like I’m 5?
A good example for metadata and privacy that might be applicable to you is photos. Phone cameras attach a ton of useful data to your photos, often including the exact gps coordinates where it was taken. Sharing those files directly with people could potentially leak your home address. Most online photo hosting services (Facebook, imgur, Instagram, Lemmy, etc) strip that data for you but that wouldn’t be the case if you directly emailed it to someone.
Nothing to be super paranoid about but it’s a great example of metadata leaking unintuitive information.
Metadata can include phone model, camera type (aperture, size, other camera stuff idk), gps location, owner’s name, date created, etc. This info can be used to identify you and fingerprint you.
Ok, so I do know about all this, but I guess I never knew this was what it was called
An incredibly generic answer is that metadata is just “data about data”. In the given example, the photo was the data, so time taken, location, phone model, etc is all data about the picture, i.e. metadata. The same can be true of any kind of data. If you’re used to windows file extensions you could even think of those as metadata. “.txt” doesn’t change the contents of a file, but it does tell you that it’s text.
When you take the picture, the picture is the data, the how, when and where of the action of taking the picture is the metadata. Same with other generated information.