Controlling Your Digital Footprints: An NPR Report

Your child posts an innocent photo of the family dog on a social media site. No problem, right? Not necessarily.

As this recent report from NPR's "Weekend Edition" explains, there are many apps available that can pinpoint precisely where a photo was taken, in effect making it possible to lead someone right to your child.

This is due to a process called geotagging, or adding geographic location "metadata" to photos, videos and other media.

"Today all smartphones and most cameras add those tags automatically," NPR's Steve Henn explains. "It's like writing your address on the back of a photo."

In this report, Henn demonstrates how easy it is to drop a photo into an app that will reveal all of the metadata attached to it. Such apps allow someone to see exactly where the photo was taken — right down to the building, and even where in the building.

"All of this information gets stored, and if you email a picture to a friend or post it on a social network, a lot of that can be out there and easily accessible," Henn says. This data is catalogued with each photo, Henn explains, "unless you go into your phone and turn the location services information on your camera off, which you have to know a little bit to do. But most people, I think, don't do it."

Henn, who has an 11-year-old daughter himself, says some new tools have emerged to help people control their own digital footprints, such as Wickr, an app developed by security and privacy experts that lets you send encrypted text, photo and video messages. It also allows you set a time limit for how long a message is shared. Wickr, which has the tagline "Leave No Trace," boasts on its site that it "flips messaging on its head, giving control to the sender instead of the receiver (or servers in between)."

In the wake of the NSA scandal, at a time of heightened awareness about just how easily our personal information is collected, privacy is on everyone's minds — including concerned parents.

"Perhaps over time," Henn says, "as we continue to have conversations about privacy like this, we'll see more attention in Silicon Valley about making tools available that are easy to use that also allow you to control how your information is shared." And that let you rest easy if a photo of Buster happens to be shared online.