Cat website may need to come with warning

In an Altoona house near Fifth Street Southwest and 18th Street Court Southwest, live two cats — one white with tall ears, and another brown with black stripes.

In Des Moines, in an apartment near Cottage Grove Avenue and 29th Street, lives a striped kitten with white paws known to wear a Superman costume.

In Waukee, a fluffy cat apparently approves of its master's TV viewing choices.

This information comes from the website called I Know Where Your Cat Lives, assembled by Owen Mundy, an art professor at Florida State University. The site, the New York Times reports, uses data from cat pictures posted to social media to locate the cat's home — or at least where the pictures of the cat were sent from.

The website is part fun — look at all the kitties! — and part warning — you're giving away a lot more about yourself than you think when you post photos to the Internet.

Apps often include latitude and longitude in the coding of the pictures posted. That data can be accessed by anyone. The cat site doesn't list specific addresses, but the location data is pretty close.

If you don't want your cat's home on the site, the operators recommend increasing your privacy settings on applications such as Twitter, Instagram and Flickr.