SALT LAKE CITY — Since the rise of smartphones, all kinds of information about yourself is now available to the entire world, or at least to those willing to go looking for it. Among that information is data about where you are and where you have been, sometimes accurate to within a few feet.

For the last several months, a dire "warning" has been making the rounds across social media sites claiming that photos taken of grandkids or children displays such location information, making them vulnerable to someone who may cause them harm:

"Warning if you take photos with your cell phone of your kids, grand kids, elderly family members -- WATCH THIS," reads one such post, linking to a 2010 news story from a local NBC news affiliate showing details of how to access this kind of data.

The new reality is that finding such information through photos posted to social media sites is much harder than it used to be.

Data about location can be stored in photos in the form of metadata, that is, data about the photo itself, such as the time it was taken, what exposure level, how long the lense was, the color profile, and even the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. This is called EXIF data, and its relatively easy to find. Several websites exist where a user can paste a link to a photo and see a display of all the metadata attached to it.

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Not so fast, Snapchat. Those 10-seconds-or-less pictures appear to have a much longer life, deep inside of smartphones.

Before the various Facebook privacy battles and the NSA data mining scandal that is still going on, smartphone users may have thought very little about the information that was going into the photos they chose to post. Facebook and Twitter may have preserved this data earlier, but now it is stripped from photos before they go online, unless a user chooses to add a location after it is uploaded.

Facebook may still have the original EXIF data assigned to the photo, but it does not appear anywhere on the version that is made public.

One major social media site does not appear to delete metadata before posts, however: Tumblr. it was possible upon searching to view the location data for at least one photo on the site. Most photos posted, however, did not have any metadata file or omitted GPS data from the file.

Those concerned, however, about the possibility that their location could be made public can take several steps. First and foremost is making sure GPS location services are turned off on your phone when you're taking photos. GPS is necessary for some commonly used apps such as Google Maps, and as such, many users keep it on all the time. Turning it off when you don't explicitly need it will prevent a location from being added to a photo.

Users or parents of minor users might also chose to limit what apps have access to your phone's location services. Every phone is different, but details are generally available in the phone's main settings.

There are also apps that can delete EXIF data from photos on your phone, such as EXIF Viewer.

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