Complete manual/40/en
From Gender and Tech Resources
Metadata is data about your data, including how and when you created it, where you stored or sent it, when and where you got online to upload it, and more. Most metadata is information that is needed for the basic infrastructure of our digital systems—including the Internet and our mobile phones networks—to work properly. Metadata enables your email to be delivered correctly, for the files on your computer to be found and stay where you left them, and for you to be able to receive text messages and phone calls from around the world almost instantaneously.