With the current rise of AI and deepfake technology, abusing personal data has never been easier. Turning social media into a treasure trove of data which criminals can exploit in more ways than ever.

Yet, 75% of parents still share their kids' data on social media, unaware that they are exposing them to severe dangers like identity theft, scamming, harassment and even child pornography.

To make matters worse, 2 out of 3 parents have followers and social media connections they’ve never met in real life before – making it easy for criminals to infiltrate their private online circles.

With the digital privacy of a whole generation at risk, Germany’s leading telecommunications brand needed to take action and make parents change their online sharing behavior – and finally start to #ShareWithCare.

Using the latest Al technology on a single photograph, we created the virtually aged version of a 9-year-old girl: Ella. In our film, she confronts her parents – and by extension parents worldwide – with the consequences of sharing kids' data online, sending a gut-wrenching warning from the future. This way, our film became both a literal demonstration of AI manipulation capabilities and an emotional plea for the online safety of all children. As part of the campaign, we also created a solution to the problem: a social media filter pixelating children’s faces, empowering parents to #ShareWithCare and easily protect their children’s privacy.

Our PR strategy was built upon a communication piece which no parent can ignore: a child in need.

Parents tend to think their children’s digital safety solely depends on their kids' online behavior. Therefore, parents focus all their energy on controlling their kids, and telling them what to do, disregarding the consequences of their own actions.

To raise awareness for the issue of “sharenting”, and convince parents to #ShareWithCare, we flipped the script and gave voice to a child, by creating a powerful testimonial that could show parents the consequences of their careless online behavior.

Usually, deepfake technology requires a large data set of source videos and a complex face-mapping process. But, since we wanted to stress the harm that can be done with just a single picture, our challenge was to create a whole deepfake video from a single JPEG file: a photo of 9-year-old Ella, just like those that can easily be found on social media.

First, we fed that photo to an AI engine that created a realistic version of a grown-up Ella by ageing her facial features.

Then, we trained a new machine-learning engine to recognize faces in moving images and replace it with Ella’s aged face.

Finally, we recorded Ella’s message using a stand-in actress and replaced her face using our newly trained engine. The engine was able to replace the face and maintain all the original facial expressions and emotions.

The result was Ella’s heartfelt testimonial, which we posted on social media, reaching parents on the same platforms where they expose their children's data.

Ella’s message was just the first step in the parents' journey towards a safer online behavior. Deutsche Telekom couldn’t just point at the problem, they also had to provide a solution. So, we created a social media filter that used facial recognition technology to automatically pixelate any child's face in a picture, allowing parents to easily #ShareWithCare.

Ella’s message became a viral hit, reaching 71 countries with over 51 million views and 2.9 billion impressions, sparking the public’s demand for data privacy and security information, which led to a record of over 184.000 visits to the German campaign landing page since its launch on 3rd of July 2023.

Thousands of social media comments indicate behavioral change, confirmed in a pre/post-exposure survey where 2 out of 3 parents stated they changed their opinion on “sharenting” and 55% of parents, who previously shared their children's images, said they would conceal their identity in the future.

62% of non-customer parents affirmed that Telekom’s data safety and virtual privacy commitment will make them consider the company as a telecommunications provider in the future.

Furthermore, Ella’s message is now an educational tool used by European police agencies, such as the Scotland police and the state police of North Rhine-Westphalia and Hessen, Germany.