Credit: @meghan/Instagram & @orlandobloom/Instagram

Parents Issued Urgent Warning To Not Post Photo Of Children With Emoji Faces Anymore

Parents have been issued a warning that they shouldn’t post photos of their children with emojis covering their faces anymore.

The trend of covering children’s faces with emojis in social media posts has become increasingly popular among parents seeking to protect their little ones’ privacy.

From celebrity parents like Meghan Markle and Gigi Hadid to everyday families, the practice seemed like the perfect compromise – allowing proud parents to share precious moments while shielding their children from online exposure.

However, cybersecurity experts are now issuing urgent warnings that this approach provides virtually no real protection and may actually create a dangerous false sense of security.

“I need to be brutally honest here: putting an emoji over a child’s face provides virtually no real privacy protection whatsoever,” explains Lisa Ventura, an award-winning cybersecurity specialist and founder of Cyber Security Unity to The Independent.

“This approach is more security theatre than actual security.”

The fundamental problem, according to experts, is that parents are still sharing massive amounts of identifiable information about their children, even with faces obscured.

Every photo tells a story through background details, clothing, locations, and metadata that can be pieced together to create comprehensive profiles of children’s lives.

Advanced artificial intelligence tools can now effortlessly remove emoji stickers and reconstruct faces for malicious purposes, including cyberbullying, blackmail, and creating abuse-related content.

What was once considered a protective barrier has become easily penetrable.

Even without seeing a child’s face, strangers can deduce approximate age and physical build, school location from uniforms or logos, daily routines from timestamp patterns, home areas from background locations, and family activities and habits.

“Most parents aren’t just posting one carefully emoji-protected photo,” Ventura notes.

“They’re sharing multiple images over time, and the combined data from all those posts creates a much bigger privacy concern than any single image.”

This cumulative data problem means that what appears to be isolated, protected posts actually build comprehensive profiles of children’s lives over time.

Christoph C. Cemper, founder of AIPRM, warns NetMums that exposing children’s details online could see them fall victim to fraud or other crimes.

The risks include identity theft, where criminals can use children’s names, ages, and photos to open fake accounts, often going undetected for years, since children don’t typically monitor credit reports.

Photos can be weaponized for cyberbullying and harassment against children years later, potentially affecting their mental health and social development.

Police report that images of children found online are frequently misused for s**ualized purposes, with criminals actively searching platforms for content to distribute in illegal forums.

Even innocent photos can be altered to ridicule children or place them in inappropriate situations, particularly by online trolls and cyberbullies.

These manipulated images can follow children throughout their lives, affecting future opportunities and relationships.

When parents post on social media platforms, they typically relinquish usage rights to those images.

Platforms can use children’s photos worldwide for free and may pass them to third parties.

Every uploaded photo also trains facial recognition algorithms and builds advertising profiles.

“Every photo you upload trains facial recognition algorithms and builds advertising profiles,” Ventura explains, highlighting how children become part of data collection systems before they can consent.

Some parents, like cybersecurity strategy manager Bharti Lim, have shifted to analog methods of obscuring identity by showing only the backs of heads, using natural obstructions like hats or sunglasses, avoiding videos where children speak to prevent voice cloning, and ensuring face coverings are ‘baked into’ the original photo.

Alternative secure sharing methods include using private group chats with trusted family and friends, sharing via encrypted messaging apps like Signal, creating private iCloud albums for extended family access, and setting all social media accounts to private with carefully vetted followers.

“If you wouldn’t hand a physical copy of that photo to a complete stranger in the street, don’t post it online,” Ventura advises.

“Because that’s essentially what you’re doing, except that stranger might be able to keep it forever, or worse, use it in unauthorized ways you did not intend.”

This golden rule helps parents consider the true reach and permanence of their social media posts.

Perhaps the most important consideration is that children cannot consent to having their lives documented online.

Once photos are uploaded, they’re preserved in digital amber, potentially affecting future job searches, college admissions, and personal relationships.

“Children deserve to have that right protected until they’re old enough to make informed decisions about their own digital footprint,” Ventura emphasizes.

“It might mean missing out on some likes and comments, but protecting our children’s future autonomy might just be worth that sacrifice.”

For parents who want to continue sharing while minimizing risks, experts recommend reviewing privacy settings by switching profiles to private and regularly auditing followers, limiting information by avoiding sharing names, birthdates, addresses, or school details, turning off location services to prevent automatic geotagging of photos, using strong security by enabling multi-factor authentication on all accounts, and monitoring accounts by watching for suspicious activity and reporting concerns immediately.

Related Article: Police Issue Urgent Warning If You See Horse Emoji On Your Child’s Phone

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