From Snopes
Trying to protect your child's privacy online? You’ll need more than an emoji
By Laerke Christensen
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)...
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...”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
