The Duchess of Sussex’s new Instagram post shows her hugging her daughter, Princess Lilibet, four, as they sit together in loving harmony on a rock by the sea in honour of International Women’s Day.
“For the women she will one day be…Happy International Women’s Day,” reads the caption, while she gives “Papa Sussex” [Prince Harry] picture credits.
The sky is a perfect blue. It’s a powerful and cuddly photo – and it’s the favoured pose: the back or side of Lilibet’s head. We’ve seen it so many times before. There’s the back of Lilibet’s head wearing a reversed baseball cap while helping out in a charity kitchen for Thanksgiving in November, a “Happy Holidays” post in December with her hair covering her face, and there she is enjoying pumpkin picking in October, pulled along in a cart by Meghan, while Prince Archie, six, races around, only visible from behind too.
It’s known as “sharenting with caution” – and aims to protect a child’s privacy from identity theft, online exploitation, deepfakes and other security risks.
I get it. I really do. Parents are only now understanding the effect that putting their children online has on their children, never mind the real danger of their image being stolen, too. The only issue is that only a few weeks ago, Meghan shared the first photo of Lilibet’s face in years in a Valentine’s Day post. In the photo, Harry carries his daughter, who is wearing a pink ballet outfit and holding red balloons – with her face clearly visible.
It sent the internet into overdrive as fans finally got a real idea of what the red-haired Lilibet looks like now – and the general consensus is she’s just like Harry. Meghan captioned the photo: “These two + Archie = my forever Valentines.”
Meghan also showed Archie and Lilibet’s faces in a relaxed family photo taken in 2021 when Lilibet was only a baby, and Archie was two. Then, for her fourth birthday, Lilibet’s eyes and top half of her face could be seen, with the rest of her face covered by Meghan’s arms as she cuddled the princess. So why all the chopping and changing?
Last year, Meghan shared pictures from a trip to Disneyland, hiding Archie and Lilibet’s faces with an orange and a pink heart, respectively. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s a social media game of peekaboo; Shall we? Shan’t we? Shall we hide her face with emojis? Or obscure it with her hair – or my arm?
Never not publicity-hungry, Meghan is clearly eager to show the world her royal children and get the ball rolling with their “public life”, despite all of Prince Harry’s pleas for privacy. But in reality, it all feels like performative privacy – annoying, and increasingly adopted by countless other celebrities too.
Carrie Johnson is endlessly sharing her perfect-looking “mum life” with wholesome pictures of Wilfred, five, Romy, four, Frank, two and Poppy, nearly one, on Instagram. It’s a mixture of idyllic romps around the British countryside feeding various animals, and glorious shots of honey-limbed Carrie and her mop-haired children on glistening exotic shores.
Her fairytale life of petting zoos, beaches in West Wittering and the Cayman Islands, as well as muddy walks in the UK and the inside of their cosy Oxfordshire home, is all a useful distraction to the fact Carrie is married to a lumbering mess of a man more than 20 years her senior. But while we might know the intimate details of the colour of her children’s pyjamas, we have never seen their faces, which are endlessly hidden with clever angles and, yes, cartoon emojis.
Similarly, Priyanka Chopra and Blake Lively have the annoying habit of sticking an emoji over their kids’ faces – usually a heart or cartoonified masks. Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik used a Hulk emoji to hide their daughter Khai’s face in a family photo shared on Instagram during Halloween 2020.
But if you are so concerned with a child’s privacy, why share their updates at all? With their faces obscured, these parents are still sharing massive amounts of identifiable data. Pictures give hints at locations, ages, and hair colour, and also of daily routines, which surely all cause a privacy concern.
It’s announcing to the world: “Hey, I’m worried about privacy, but will crack on and share anyway, just so you know we’re living a perfect family life. Thanks for coming.”
And, I would argue there is something dishonest about using your children as breadcrumbs for content, too. It’s almost as if they are saying they are better than the rest of us who happily post the pictures of our kids in our social media posts, because we want to share our moments of joy. Now, we have another thing that celebrities make us feel bad about.
However, putting an emoji over a child’s face on social media does not provide 100 per cent privacy protection, and it’s time for self-righteous parents to stop pretending that it does.
Posting photos, even with faces covered with flashing hearts, helps train facial recognition algorithms and builds a digital profile of the child. There is a lot of scaremongering online about whether AI tools can remove or bypass an emoji or sticker that has been placed over a child’s face in a photo. Quite frankly, any photo of a child online is a risk.
It’s too late for me to do anything about my kid’s online privacy after 10 years of posting them bare-faced, and I’m sorry for that. I admit that I have been far too cavalier about it, although it felt like a wonderful document of their life so far. But either do it, or don’t, and stop making the rest of us who do post photos of our children’s faces online feel bad.
Ultimately, I know Meghan and co have a point in trying to protect their children against facial recognition technology and deepfakes. The #NoKidPolicy trend on social media centres on the growing movement of users and celebrities advocating against children’s faces, lives, or personal data online, which is a position I admire.
But Carrie and the like are trying to have their social media cake and eat it too by occupying this muddled middle ground. Last week, Johnson even posted a photo of baby Poppy’s face while out enjoying cocktails in a restaurant. If you are someone with genuine concerns about privacy, don’t engage at all then. Or at least switch to a private group rather than a public platform?
At least celebrity parents like Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling, Cameron Diaz and Benji Madden and Amal and George Clooney stick to their guns – it’s a no-show ever for their kids online.
The best protection is not to post photos of children at all. But please, either show the whole picture, or none at all. It’s so much easier to pretend to yourself – and the world – that you can post about your kids “half safely”.
It looks responsible while minimising risks. But, to the rest of us, it looks like you are trying to have the best of both worlds. And when it comes to celebrities and their privacy, hasn’t that always been the case?
