Parents love to capture the great moments of their children, from the first steps to birthday candles.
But a new study from the United Kingdom shows that many of these precious images can be digitized, analyzed and transformed into data by cloud storage services, and almost half of the parents do not even realize it.
A survey of 2,019 British parents, led by Global Pensus And ordered by the Swiss Privacy Technology Company Proton, found that 48% of parents were not aware of suppliers like Google Photos, Apple iCloud, Amazon Photos and Dropbox can access and analyze the photos they download.
First lady Melania Trump, joined by President Donald Trump, noted before President Trump signed the deed of withdrawal in the Garden Rose of the White House on May 19, 2025, in Washington, DC (SOMODEVILLA / GETTY Images)
These companies Use artificial intelligence To sort the images in albums, recognize faces and locations and suggest memories. Although practical, the same technology can also have more dangerous uses, such as Deepfake videos.
Professor Carsten Maple, a cybersecurity expert at Warwick University, warns that with as little as 20 photos, AI tools can create a convincing digital clone of a person, including Deepfake videos. These tools do not need a high resolution scan or a video sequence, just a handful of Everyday photos in the cloud.
“Parents involuntarily open their children to a possible exploitation by criminals who wish to use their data for their own ends,” Maple in Edinburg Eventing News said.
He added that even banal photos, such as a child in school or in the courtyard, can reveal names and places. Fifty-three percent of the parents interviewed had no idea that this was possible.
Protect your daughter from deep buttocks and online abuses
President Donald Trump invited First Lady Melania Trump to sign the new anti-Revenge porn act that she helped to go to the finish line during a signature ceremony at the Garden Rose Garden on the White House on Monday afternoon. (SOMODEVILLA / GETTY Images)
More than half of the parents, 56%, have activated automatic photos downloads, which means that their phones constantly send new images to the cloud without ever having to press “Download”.
What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
Even without Deepfakes, data collection is extended. Only 43% of parents knew that cloud services collect metadata such as time, date and location, and only 36% questioned were aware that these companies also analyze the content of the photos.
The concern is to catch up with convenience. Almost three in four parents (72%) questioned said photo confidentiality is important and 69% recognized the risk of digital fingerprints left by storing online family photos.
First lady Melania Trump heads to a meeting to urge the adoption of the US Senate Act to the American Capitol in Washington, DC, on March 3, 2025. (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
Although the study was conducted in the United Kingdom, its results apply worldwide. American families use the same technology Platforms and face the same questions: where are children's photos go? Who looks at them? And how could they be transformed?
In the AI ​​era, a family photo is not only a memory, these are also data that can be scanned, stored, sold and, more and more, manipulated in Deep Fakefakes.
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Global Pensus did not immediately return the request for comments from Fox News Digital.
