In a world increasingly migrating online, our personal privacy seems to be narrowing down. Hence, many parents would be understandably reluctant to post images of their children’s pictures online. Those who post their children tend to be cautious, either by posting privately or by obscuring the child’s identity through the use of emojis.
With the rise of AI and its ability to manipulate images with relative ease, posting your images and videos online has become contentious and potentially risky. xAI’s Grok has recently developed a feature that allows X users to “undress” images. X and its users faced immense global scrutiny for allowing users to create sexually explicit material of minors and women without their consent. This increased risk of posting online has even led celebrities to use emojis to conceal their children’s identities.
However, Lisa Ventura, a cybersecurity specialist and founder of Cyber Security Unity, shares that the emojis offer no security whatsoever. “I need to be brutally honest here – putting an emoji over a child’s face provides virtually no real privacy protection whatsoever,” Ventura told The Independent in an interview. Ventura explains that this approach functions as security theatre, not actual security. Security theatre creates the impression that something protective is happening without delivering any tangible results.
Posting with the Kids
According to a 2024 survey, 3 in 4 parents post content online involving their children. With our growing surveillance capabilities and AI expansion in the online sphere, the risks of being harassed, stalked, or physically harmed are increasingly high. Parvan Kaur, a social media expert, explains that “an emoji isn’t privacy, it’s a false sense of security.” The pictures parents post online contain massive amounts of identifiable information, such as a school uniform, bedroom background, or distinctive clothing. These often overlooked factors become a digital breadcrumb that can be used to extract information. These details eventually accumulate and can then be used to discover who you are. Age, build, location, and even which school a child attends can be deduced from single images.
Ventura explains that the combined data from all those posts creates a much bigger privacy concern than a single image. Each new photo adds another layer to a developing profile of data on you. Siblings, relatives, and friends appear in frames regularly, painting a digital picture of your profile, with increasing accuracy.
Contextual Inference Reveals What Emojis Hide
Experts in artificial intelligence explain how this identity reconstruction works without removing anything. Karni Chagal-Feferkorn, an assistant professor of AI at the University of South Florida, describes the process using a vivid example. Imagine a photograph of a blond man wearing a suit, sitting in the Oval Office with his face covered. Observers could assert with assured certainty who that man is.
Applied to children, the detective work becomes more substantial but no less possible. Details in photographs still provide many clues about where children live or attend school. Information about friends, family members, and regular activities can be deduced from the images. School logos, bedroom décor, or nearby relatives paint a picture of living spaces and even their area. What makes this dangerous is contextual inference. A blurred or obscured face cannot protect when other elements in the photograph communicate openly.
Tony Anscombe, a chief security evangelist at ESET, highlights another vulnerability that parents rarely consider. The location where an image was taken can reveal identity even in public spaces visited by hundreds of people daily. Tools now exist that allow the identification of other images captured at the same location. Detecting the child in background photos and identifying other people appearing with that child through image searches becomes possible. This interconnected approach creates multiple pathways to discovering a child’s identity.
GPS metadata adds another invisible layer of risk. Danie Strachan, senior privacy counsel at VeraSafe, explains that every image carries layers of information, constructing a detailed portrait of a child’s life. GPS metadata and visual landmarks can pinpoint a home, school, or favourite park with alarming accuracy. Timestamps quietly chart daily routines and weekly patterns, exposing when and where families move. Strangers can map the school pickup time, the grocery store visited, and the park where children play most frequently.
AI Systems Recognize Patterns Parents Never Notice
Strachan notes that AI does not require a face to recognize a person. It excels at connecting fragments like clothing patterns, body proportions, and surrounding household details. Systems trained on billions of images can match these cues to uncovered photos elsewhere. This re-identification can happen almost immediately with this AI technology . A child photographed at different locations wearing distinctive clothing trains these algorithms to create trackable patterns on the person. The AI algorithm can then access thousands of public images across social media and the internet and compare them to find a match.
The question of whether AI can actually remove emojis has also been raised and gained significant attention. Ventura states that there is a lot of scaremongering about AI being able to magically reconstruct faces from emoji-covered photos. The good news is that current AI technology cannot reliably remove emoji stickers and restore original facial features beneath them. However, this technical limitation provides minimal comfort to privacy advocates.
Sharenting Creates Permanent Digital Footprints
The practice of sharing your children’s information online has been coined the term “sharenting.” Research demonstrates how extensively this practice impacts children’s digital futures. A 2010 study revealed that over 90% of 2-year-olds and 80% of infants in the United States already had an online identity. By age 13, parents typically had uploaded around 1,300 images and videos of their children online. This might be a conservative figure for families with prevalent social media usage.
“Shareting” poses far more than just privacy risks, as Barclays predicts that sharenting could account for 75% of identity fraud by 2030. Barclays projects that this identity fraud could translate to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual losses. Criminals require only a name, birth date, and address to begin building fraudulent identities. Information gleaned from a geotagged birthday photo is sufficient to garner personal information. Malicious actors can hoard this data for years. When children reach adulthood, fraudulent activities begin. By then, establishing a legitimate identity becomes extraordinarily difficult.
Stacey Steinberg, a legal expert at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, has evaluated how parental sharing impacts children’s rights. The tension between a parent’s right to share and a child’s right to privacy remains largely unresolved in law. Children deserve protection until they reach an age where they can make informed decisions about their own digital footprints. Posting creates permanent consequences long before children develop the maturity to consent.
How Published Photos Can Be Weaponized
The risks of published photos extend into troubling territories. Cybersecurity researchers documented that AI tools can remove emoji stickers and re-insert child faces for purposes of cyberbullying, blackmail, and creating abuse-related content. A 2024 report from France found that 50% of photos and videos shared on paedophile crime forums were initially posted by parents
Police consistently report that images of children found online are frequently misused for sexualized purposes. Paedocriminals actively search for such images to distribute and sell them through illegal online forums and Discord chatrooms. Even seemingly innocent snapshots can be altered by online trolls and cyberbullies. Harmless images are quickly edited to ridicule children or depict them in inappropriate situations. The exploitation and blackmail of minors on these platforms have increased at an alarming rate and have already had devastating consequences, with some minors committing suicide. According to the International Policing and Protection Research Institute, criminals now use non-AI-generated images to train software that generates more abuse material on the dark web.
Cyberbullying through published photos represents another documented threat. Children’s photos can easily be used to bully and humiliate them online. Photos or videos can serve as a means for cyberbullying years after initial publication. A child bullied in elementary school may face that same content resurfacing in middle school or high school. Digital permanence means consequences accumulate.
The Waiver Problem: Parents Rarely Control
Parents attempting to minimize their children’s digital footprints face an unexpected obstacle. Nearly every children’s activity now requires a photo image waiver. Yelena Ambartsumian, a founding attorney at AMBART LAW, describes the challenge from personal experience. She had to be the parent at a birthday party whose child missed the first 20 minutes because they could not enter without signing the waiver. They had to wait for a manager or even the space’s lawyer to obtain a way to not consent to the standard image waiver. This systemic issue means that even conscientious parents cannot fully protect their children’s images. Schools, sports clubs, dance studios, and party venues all assume permission to photograph children.
Is There Any Safe Way to Post Children’s Photos?
Experts acknowledge that perhaps one way exists to safely post children’s photos online, though such images are rare on social networks. Anscombe explains that if an image has no identifying context, such as a passport-style photo with a plain background and non-identifying clothing, and if the image has no metadata, then no current tools exist that will magically remove the blur or the emoji. However, this approach requires removing practically all identifying information from images. A plain background photo provides no sense of personality, moment, or memory, and defeats the purpose of sharing for most parents.
An overlooked piece of information that reveals a lot about the image is metadata. Many parents do not realize that smartphone cameras embed location data into images. Posting photos without stripping metadata reveals precise coordinates to anyone downloading the image. Platforms may remove metadata during upload, but this varies by platform. The safer approach requires manually removing this information before sharing it anywhere.
Read More: Grandma Goes Against Parents’ Wishes And Posts Pic Of Newborn Online
What Experts Recommend Instead
Cybersecurity and media literacy experts in multiple countries now call on parents to entirely stop posting photos of their children online. This recommendation reflects the cumulative risks rather than single dramatic dangers. The internet never forgets, and digital traces will persist indefinitely or at least until societal collapse. Children who never consented to their images being shared will still have to bear the consequences of their parents throughout their digital lives.
Yaron Litwin, a safety and AI expert and Chief Marketing Officer at Canopy Parental Control App, emphasizes that parents who minimize their children’s digital footprints throughout childhood are doing them a significant favour. This perspective shifts the focus from parental desire to share toward children’s future autonomy and consent. A child photographs beautifully at age 3. At age 17, that same photo could embarrass them. That same image could possibly affect their employment at age 25. At age 35, it could resurface in unexpected contexts, jeopardising them in some way or another.
Ventura offers practical guidance for parents who decide to continue posting despite these warnings. Parents should first ask themselves before they make the decision to post their children online: “If you wouldn’t hand a physical copy of that photo to a complete stranger in the street, don’t post it online.” Because that is essentially what happens when someone posts online. The stranger might keep the image and use it in unauthorized and nefarious ways. They might combine it with other information to locate the child, which could possibly endanger the child’s life.
Children deserve protection until they reach an age to make informed decisions about their digital presence. This right matters more than receiving likes and comments on social media. Parents must understand that their choices today shape their children’s digital futures permanently. The emoji-covered face offers security theatre, not genuine safety. The real protection requires refusing to post at all.