so it is important to understand what metadata is to understand why it is important to cover up the metadata or clean metadata associated with you.
metadata is attached to anything is attached to all types of files and folders.
some programs add a lot of metadata to a certain file.
some don't add any.
and when i say files, these are things like word documents, powerpoints, a photo, an email.
anything that is created from a program can have metadata associated with it.
and metadata isn't always bad, but when it comes to security and anonymity, metadata might have information that you do not want on it.
when you send that file or folder out.
an example of this might be like a picture of a cat that you took one day, right?
this picture has a lot more than just this picture.
it has metadata attached and associated to it.
and this metadata can contain information like the type of phone the image was taken on, the username of that phone, the location where the photo was taken.
and specifically in things like iphone and androids, they actually give the geolocation.
they give the longitude, longitude and latitude.
so you can find exactly where the photo was taken and it might have the time associated as well.
and all of this information is probably information when we want anonymity.
this is not information we want attached to the things we send out.
if you've ever seen in windows, the details of a document like this one, for example, you can see the authors there, right?
author's name, when it was created, total time editing it, the version number.
and that window, if we were to scroll down on it also shows where is it saved on the computer, right?
it'll show the names of the file directory and the folders.
and all of this is metadata.
metadata can be a great thing and it helps a lot of things operate in today's world and internet, but it's not something we want around in our files and folders.
so it's important we clean it out.
now, an os like tails actually comes with a metadata cleaner built in, which is super useful.
in the next few videos in this anonymity course, we'll explore how to clean out data.
if you're watching this in the foundations, the free course on dark web academy, we don't dive too much into metadata.
it's definitely important to understand that the files and folders you create have metadata associated and you should look at cleaning those out before you send those files or folders anywhere else.