There's a massive danger that comes with posting "peace sign" selfies online.

If you’re a fan of throwing the peace sign in selfies, we’ve got some bad news. You could be inadvertently setting yourself up for data theft. Which let’s be honest, is up there on most people’s list of worst nightmares.

According to Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII), throwing a peace sign and uploading the image to social media leaves the fingerprints of your index and middle finger exposed; the same fingers many now use to verify identities when logging onto smartphones, laptops, and other digital devices.

"Just by casually making a peace sign in front of a camera, fingerprints can become widely available," NII researcher Isao Echizen told Sankei Shimbun newspaper earlier this week, explaining that because of the quality of camera phones these days, collecting a clear and usable print from a photo is now substantially easier than anyone would have previously thought.

"Fingerprint data can be recreated if [the photo including] fingerprints are in focus with strong lighting in a picture," he explained.

With that could easily follow access to your contacts, private photos and videos, bank accounts, and just about everything else that you can imagine.

But before you go swearing off your go-to pose, there are other options.

For starters, a transparent film designed to attach itself to fingers and disguise prints is currently being developed. Very James Bond... 

Alternatively, you could just make sure your peace pose is taken in a low light setting. The choice is yours, friends. Pose at your own risk.

But the technology would not be ready for another two years, the paper said.