The simplest way to explain what a remote node is would be to say that it's any node that is not local.

If you are running a node at your home or place or business, you are running a local node. Calling a node a "local" node, means you access it locally. This means you're not going out on the internet to access it. Rather, the node is available on your local network.

Let's say you're a business owner, and you run a node from your office. When you're at work, that node is considered to be a local node, from your perspective. You can hop on your work computer and log into the node on it's local IP address (often 192.168.x.x or 10.10.x.x). But maybe sometimes when you're home at night you'd like to access that node. From that perspective, the node is a remote node. Whenever you're connection is leaving the safety of your local network and going out over the internet, that means you're accessing the node remotely, which means it's a remote node, from that perspective.

Generally, however, people tend to refer to remote nodes as only those remote nodes which they don't own. So when someone says that you're compromising your security by accessing a remote node, especially to create a transaction, that's what they mean.

One final point: perhaps you have your own remote node hosted on a VPS. And maybe you set up a VPN between the VPS and your local network. From that perspective, even though it's technically a remote node, the node will appear to be on your local network (assuming the VPN is set up appropriately).

To boil it all down, as already pointed out, (a) a remote node is any node which is not a local node, and (b) calling a node a "remote node" tends to imply that the node is not owned by you.

The simplest way to explain what a remote node is would be to say that it's any node that is not local.

If you are running a node at your home or place or business, you are running a local node. Calling a node a "local" node, means you access it locally. This means you're not going out on the internet to access it. Rather, the node is available on your local network.

Let's say you're a business owner, and you run a node from your office. When you're at work, that node is considered to be a local node, from your perspective. You can hop on your work computer and log into the node on it's local IP address (often 192.168.x.x or 10.10.x.x). But maybe sometimes when you're home at night you'd like to access that node. From that perspective, the node is a remote node. Whenever you're connection is leaving the safety of your local network and going out over the internet, that means you're accessing the node remotely, which means it's a remote node, from that perspective.

Generally, however, people tend to refer to remote nodes as only those remote nodes which they don't own. So when someone says that you're compromising your privacy by accessing a remote node, especially to create a transaction, that's what they mean.

One final point: perhaps you have your own remote node hosted on a VPS. And maybe you set up a VPN between the VPS and your local network. From that perspective, even though it's technically a remote node, the node will appear to be on your local network (assuming the VPN is set up appropriately).

To boil it all down, as already pointed out, (a) a remote node is any node which is not a local node, and (b) calling a node a "remote node" tends to imply that the node is not owned by you.