Kids' Faces, Kept Private

We've always covered our kids' faces in the videos we post.

That's the Baby Acrobatics rule. The footage library behind it — the Media Catalog — censors faces before anything goes out. Non-negotiable.

The problem is everyone else. A grandparent posting the birthday. An emoji sticker on an Instagram Story, which means the original already went to Instagram. A school logo in the corner of a photo you thought was anonymous. The face is only one thing a post gives away.

So I built a public version of the work we already do. Two rooms.

the tool

Blur Kids' Faces runs in the browser. You pick a photo or a clip (up to two minutes). Faces get found on the device. You cover them — blur, mosaic, or an emoji drawn onto the file — then download a copy and post that. The original never leaves the phone. Nothing is uploaded to us. It's free. You don't need to buy Baby Acrobatics.

Mosaic is the stronger cover: a blur, then two pixelation passes, baked into the saved file. That still isn't a promise that a face is impossible to recover. A missed frame, a soft edge, a kid walking back into shot — you open the copy and watch the whole thing before you post. Detection misses people. You can add a cover by hand.

On video the cover has to keep up. You can trim, step through frames, and check the whole clip before you download it.

The sticker-on-Story version of this is the thing I wanted to kill. Hiding a face inside the app that already has the original is not the same job.

the guides

Covering a face is the five-minute job. The rest is messier: old albums, relatives who keep posting, location in the file, photographers at events, what happens when a child's photo sits in a public post that a company might train on.

That's Kids' Online Privacy. How to take photos down. How to ask family not to post, with actual wording. What blur vs mosaic vs a solid cover actually hides. How to pull location out of a file. What to check before you drop a child's photo into an AI app.

A face cover reduces visible detail. It does not make a child anonymous, delete what's already online, or stop a screenshot. The guides are for that other half of the work.