Trying to protect your child's privacy online? You'll need more than an emoji

In August 2025, a claim circulated online that putting an emoji over a child's face in photos — a practice popularized by celebrity parents — does not protect their privacy.

One Facebook page shared an image (archived) featuring text that said parents were being "urged not to post photos of children with emoji faces anymore."

The rumor also appeared on X (archived), Instagram (archived) and TikTok (archived). 

(Facebook user Back To The Past)

According to experts from leading cybersecurity universities in the U.S. and the IAPP, a membership association for global professionals in the privacy, AI governance and digital responsibility field, while blurring or obscuring children's faces may prevent their likeness from misuse by things like artificial intelligence, it was not a one-stop shop for solving digital-privacy concerns. While it did provide a measure of safety, experts said that images contained more information than just a child's physical appearance that parents might not be aware they were sharing when posting online. 

Best practice for parents concerned about their children's digital privacy, experts advised, might be to not post at all or, at the very least, being mindful of the privacy practices of the platforms used to edit and share photos.

Experts say photos give more than just faces away

Lorrie Cranor, director of Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, said via email that placing emojis over children's faces was "far from a perfect privacy solution."

"Other aspects of the photo might leak personal information, including landmarks that might reveal the location of the photo, house number signs, license plate numbers, photos of schools that can be identified, etc. In addition, the child's hair, body shape, and possibly distinctive clothing or back pack might be visible in a photo," Cranor said.

While protecting children's identity was important, parents faced a greater danger of bad actors creating a "profile" about their children from information gleaned from photos or posts uploaded online. Lisa Ventura, the founder of Cyber Security Unity, a U.K.-based cybersecurity firm, told the Independent, a British newspaper, that photos might inadvertently reveal information about a child such as their school or their approximate age, build and location.

Meanwhile, Brittany Allen, a senior trust and safety architect at Sift, a fraud detection and management company, told online news media outlet HuffPost that parents who shared a lot of information about their children online risked scammers piecing together that information to make purchases in the child's name or to open credit accounts.

Editing photos is best, but beware of app access

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information whose speciality is digital forensics, said via email that even blurring pictures could be an imperfect method of protection. While placing an emoji generally would prevent bad actors from reverse engineering the obscured face, blurring "leaves some of the original pixel intact and so is less privacy preserving because in some situations, it is possible to extract information from even a very blurry face," Farid said.

Farid concurred with Cranor and Ventura, adding: "Having said this, there is other identifying information about a child beyond just the face, so in either case, obscuring the face is at best an imperfect way of protecting privacy."

Though experts broadly agreed blurring or obscuring a child's face should not be the only privacy measure parents considered when posting pictures online, Joanne Orlando, a digital wellbeing researcher at Western Sydney University, reportedly told ABC Australia that it could at least help prevent unsanctioned use of the child's likeness.

According to Orlando, "covering a child's face with an emoji, blurring it, or tactfully posting photos where the child is turned away from the camera" meant web crawlers — programs that scan the web and store information — could not use the the child's face in their databases. 

That meant the child's face could not be used to train AI or end up in other people's AI creations. If parents failed to cover their child's face, Orlando reportedly added that "in the worst instance" their child's face could be added to "someone's naked body."

Meanwhile, Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, the managing director of IAPP, said via email that parents who edited photos of their children before posting online should be mindful of the apps they use to do so. Zweifel-Keegan said:

Make sure to closely review its privacy policy to check for promises about third-party sharing, advertising, AI training, and security practices. Big or small, it's important to learn about the privacy settings available to you in the app to make sure only the people you want will have access to what you share.

If in doubt, leave it out

In general, experts said parents with privacy concerns should consider not posting photos of their children at all. Farid said:

If you are concerned about privacy/digital footprint (which I believe everyone should be), don't post photos of your children, especially not on public forums like Facebook and Instagram. Even if the forums are private to your family, all uploaded content is being ingested by AI models and so there is no way for you to control what happens to your content and where it may reappear.

Instead, Sarah Scheffler, an assistant professor at CyLab, recommended sharing photos with friends and family on encrypted platforms away from social media. She said via email:

The most private way to do that is to use an end-to-end encrypted chat application, but since not everyone uses one of those, sending it in a closed chatroom or even email is still usually going to be more private than using social media websites. If you post it to a social media website, consider checking the website's privacy policy to see what they do and don't say they will use it for. It's not uncommon for sites to sell or share information to third parties, or to use them for AI training.