Do emojis on family photos protect your kids’ privacy?

It’s a common trick but is it effective or a way of making us feel better, wonders Katie Rosseinsky who asks the experts

- Katie Rosseinsky

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. Emojifying 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.