Sharenting: does covering children's faces on social media protect them?

The trend of "popping an emoji" over children's faces when posting pictures of them online started with celebrities like Gigi Hadid, Meghan Markle and Mark Zuckerberg and has "trickled down to us civilians", wrote Katie Rosseinsky in The Independent.

But this gesture towards protecting children's privacy could be luring parents into a sense of false confidence, with some online safety experts suggesting that such measures are merely "security theatre".

Cautious or paranoid?

Whether to "post your kids or not to post your kids" is a "very modern" and "contentious parenting issue", said Rosseinsky. Between over-sharers documenting every moment of their child's life to "refuseniks" keeping them off their social media entirely, many of us choose a third option: digitally obscuring their face, often with an emoji. This, in theory, lets parents share "dispatches from daily life", and the "dopamine rush" of engagement that comes with it, "while also shielding the youngsters from the ills of social media".

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Although "emoji-over-face" parents are often accused of being "overly cautious or even paranoid", said Lauryn Higgins on Huffington Post, in a time when every post can become "permanent, searchable and exploitable", perhaps they're being "careful" and "smart"?

Keeping a child's face out of sight protects them from "web crawlers" – bots that search websites and categorise the content on them, Joanne Orlando, a digital wellbeing researcher at Western Sydney University, told ABC News. Covering their face prevents their likeness being used to train large-language model generative AI. "What that means for parents is the face, or parts of their child's face, will come up in people's creations of an image," said Orlando. "In the worst instance, it will be your child's face and someone's naked body."

Not mine to reproduce

Online warnings about "AI being able to magically reconstruct faces from emoji-covered photos" are "scaremongering", cybersecurity specialist Lisa Ventura told Rosseinsky. But it's true that "putting an emoji over a child's face provides virtually no real privacy protection whatsoever", simply because "most parents aren't just posting one carefully emoji-protected photo" but rather "multiple images over time". Taken collectively, these can reveal huge amounts of information about the children in them, from glimpses of a school uniform to details of where they live, which all "builds a profile".

Relying on emojis alone is a "way of performing your concerns about privacy", rather than "doing anything truly meaningful to address them", said Rosseinsky. Ultimately, it might be a "gesture that's more about the parents than the kids".

There's always the option to keep your children out of your online life. After my daughter was born, said The i Paper's Rebecca Reid, I took "thousands and thousands of pictures", but ultimately "did nothing with them", after learning how "abuse images" can be generated using "totally innocent, fully clothed" pictures. Now, "if there's a picture I really want to share", I put an emoji over her face, then upload a screenshot of the modified image, for an extra layer of protection.

Her "right to anonymity" comes first, even if it occasionally makes things "tense" with snap-happy friends or fellow parents. Beyond safety concerns, her childhood simply "isn't mine to reproduce online to entertain people", some of whom I barely know, on social media. It's her "real life, and it belongs to her". "It's my job to keep her digital footprint tiny until she can make an informed choice."