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.

Most people share pictures of their children. It’s often seen as harmless and normal online behavior. After all, social media exists to share one’s life with others, and there is nothing more important for parents than their children.

The problem is that for criminals those simple pictures are data – which can be compiled and later manipulated and exploited.

And even though lawmakers around the world are slowly turning their attention to this matter, the mass audience is still mostly unaware of the dangers of carelessly sharing children’s pictures and videos online.

So far, the public debate in many countries mainly focuses on the topic of “child labor”, with the public urging content creators to stop using their children in social media videos but ignoring the future and present dangers which anonymous parents expose their children to just by sharing “simple” photos.

That’s why during Europe’s summer holiday season 2023, when parents typically flood social media with beach photos of their children, we launched a powerful message to make them think twice before pressing the “share” button.

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.

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.