While the promise of the digital age is to make everything effortless and efficient, reality is less idyllic. Computers can break down, hackers can uncover and exploit vulnerabilities and con artists can use technology to scam millions of victims across the globe. And then there’s metadata.

Metadata is information about information. It turns out that while computers are great at displaying information (such as the info you find on Web pages), they’re still lousy at interpreting that data. But metadata can help computers and programs identify the type of information that’s on a digital document. It can also keep a record of the history of how the data in that document is managed.

According to the Associated Press, that last facet of metadata became the focus of a court case in Arizona. A Phoenix police officer asked to see the documentation created by a supervisor in regards to the officer’s demotion. The officer received printed copies of the supervisor’s notes. But the officer wanted more than that — he demanded to see the metadata for the documentation. It was his suspicion that the supervisor had created support for the demotion after the fact and then backdated the documentation. The metadata would give the true creation date.