By Molly McGinn for Verizon
A baby’s birthday photo, a beautiful dance video When shared online, they become part of a family’s digital footprint. Depending on privacy settings, AI can use them.
Dr. Siwei LiuA digital forensics expert and father of two, he is a distinguished professor of computer science at the State University of New York who studies how AI learns from public data. The danger of sharing anything online is that it becomes fair game AI Deepfakes: Duplicate photos, videos or voices created from original images or recordings. Anyone can impersonate anyone with Deepfake Children and adolescents.
“A child’s data can be misused to recreate an image or video of them in situations that are not real,” Liu explains. “This content can stay online and affect your child for years.”
Quitting social media isn’t necessarily the answer. Instead, Liu encourages more intentional sharing: post less, choose private settings, and pause before uploading anything personal. For families looking for practical ways to put these habits into practice, Verizon Provides resources with tips on managing privacy settings and talking to kids about what to share.
Here, Liu explains how digital footprints can be used in AI deepfakes.
How AI deepfakes real photos
- Step one: The photo is public. When an image or video is uploaded, it may be accessible beyond the intended audience. Even private photos can be screenshotted and made public.
- Step Two: The manipulation takes place. In some cases, an image needs to be uploaded to an AI deepfake tool. This is when it crosses over from simple image capture to digital manipulation.
- Step Three: It’s Shared. Once created, content can spread quickly—shared on social platforms, sent in private chats, increasing the risk of harm.
Families can take steps to manage their digital footprint
- Experts recommend regularly checking the app’s privacy settings. Set accounts to private and limit who can see or download photos
- Be careful with “funny” photo apps. Many viral “Edge Me,” “AI Art” or “Cartoon Me” apps can collect and store uploaded photos. See the app’s terms of use for any mention of using images for “research,” “training,” or “improvement,” which may indicate that the images may be used to train AI systems.
- Teach kids that once online there’s really no “deleting”. explain that Once something is posted onlineIt can be copied, saved, or reshared—even if the person who originally posted it chooses to delete it later.
Helping families raise awareness about AI deepfakes
Liu recommends a few practical safety habits for families:
- Liu recommends using animated avatars instead of real photos for social profile pictures.
- Removing any location data from images before sharing them online can also reduce exposure. For example, in your phone’s photo gallery, select a photo, swipe up, and remove the photo’s location data
- Watermarking real photos And selfies can make AI less attractive to crawlers.
This is the story is produced by Verizon and review and distribution Stacker.
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Previously published at hub.stackernewswire
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