Will covering your child’s face with emoji protect privacy?

To post your kids or not to post your kids? It’s a very modern — and very contentious — parenting conundrum. For every mum or dad that chooses to digitally document every stage of their tiny darling’s life in near-forensic detail, you’ll find a social media refusenik whose children are entirely absent from their online footprint. For others, though, there’s a third option. They’ll share photos of their offspring, yes, but — and here’s the crucial bit — they’ll obscure the kids’ features entirely by popping an emoji over their faces.

The go-to emoji for the job? Inevitably, it tends to be the baby, with its wide eyes, tiny curl of hair and slightly uncanny grin, although a heart (available in almost every colour of the rainbow) is another popular option. And if your little angels are behaving more like little monsters? There’s always the demon emoji.

The appeal, of course, is having your cake and eating it. Emoji-fying your children is a way to provide an insight into what you and your (doubtless very cute) family are up to, without plastering their features all over the internet in perpetuity. In theory, you get to proudly share dispatches from daily life (and experience the dopamine rush that comes when the likes and comments roll in) while also shielding the youngsters from the ills of social media. You can navigate the push-pull between your friends’ and family’s desire to keep up with your little ones and your own creeping concerns about privacy, with just a few taps of your smartphone screen.

Sounds like a win-win, right? No wonder, then, that it’s becoming such a ubiquitous practice. Now that I’m in my thirties, my social media feeds are filled with birth announcements, but spotting an actual human baby in any of these posts is something of a rarity. I’m far more used to seeing cartoonish renderings of infants plonked onto otherwise realistic family snaps.

Like so much of our digital behaviour, this trend started out among celebrities and seems to have trickled down to us civilians. The likes of Gigi Hadid, Priyanka Chopra and Blake Lively have all opted to conceal their kids in this way (presumably due to entirely reasonable safety concerns about broadcasting the faces of their children to millions of people around the world).

Earlier this month, Meghan Markle inevitably made headlines when she shared pictures from a trip to Disneyland, hiding six-year-old Archie and four-year-old Lilibet with an orange and a pink heart respectively (her behaviour was criticised as “attention seeking” in some quarters, which doesn’t seem particularly fair; presumably she’d have garnered yet more bile if she’d gone without the emojis). Even Mark Zuckerberg blocks out his older daughters’ faces when he posts them online. There is, of course, a certain irony implicit in the king of Facebook suddenly coming over all coy about digital privacy.

But is this approach really the solution to all your concerns about “sharenting”? Apologies for being the bearer of bad news, but the answer is a resounding... no. “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 the founder of Cyber Security Unity. Instead, she adds, “this approach is more security theatre than actual security” — in other words, it’s a way of performing your concerns about privacy, rather than doing anything truly meaningful to address them. Essentially, it might be a gesture that’s more about the parents than the kids.

The main problem, Ventura says, is that “even with the face obscured, you’re still sharing massive amounts of identifiable information” about your kid. Posted a photo of them in uniform with the logo or crest visible? Your followers can now work out where they go to school every day. Even without the face on show, it’s still possible to glean details such as their “approximate age, build [and] location data from the photo”, Ventura adds — and “it all builds a profile”.

It might seem alarmist, but the sheer volume of information that a casual observer can pick out from your social media profile is staggering. Adding timestamps relating to your daily routine, such as documenting the school run on an Instagram Story, for example, can be another way of inadvertently broadcasting details that would be better kept private.