Face search for parents and families

What you are up against

• Photos that outlive their contextSchool newsletters, sports club galleries, a relative's public album, a friend's tagged post. Each one is a public page with your child's face on it, and most of them are years old and nobody remembers posting them.
• Accounts wearing your child's faceA fake profile built from a teenager's public photos, used to message their classmates, to run a scam or simply to humiliate. The first sign is usually a friend asking whether a second account is real.
• Threats built on one imageFinancially motivated sextortion typically starts with a stranger posing as a peer, obtains or fabricates an image, and then demands money. The help lines above exist for exactly this, and they work best in the first hours.

Our rule on children, and why it rests on you

Our acceptable use rules prohibit searching for anyone under 18. The one exception is a parent or legal guardian searching their own child's photo, with the child's knowledge, in order to protect them. FaceSearch does not technically block a face by age; no face search engine can tell a 16-year-old from a 19-year-old reliably, and we would rather be honest about that than claim a filter we do not have. That means the rule depends on you: search your own children, tell them you are doing it and why, and do it with them when they are old enough to take part. Reports of anyone else searching a child's face are treated as abuse.

Three workflows

1. The footprint review, together

Sit down with your teenager and let them run it. Pick one clear recent photo and one from a couple of years ago, search each on the search page, and look through the source pages side by side. Most of what comes back is harmless and half-forgotten: a team photo on a club website, a tagged picture on a cousin's public account. Make a list of the pages you both want gone, and let your teenager decide what to ask the school or the club to remove. Doing this together turns surveillance into a skill they keep. The general version is on find where your photos are being used.

2. The family photo audit

Search your own face first, because family photos usually include you too. A gallery that reposted a holiday picture of you has almost certainly reposted the children in the same frame. From each result note the host, then decide the route: a polite removal request to a school or club usually works within days; a reposting site needs a formal notice, and the takedown guide has the sequence and templates. For pages that will not respond, a search-engine removal request at least stops the page showing up for your family's names.

3. When there is a fake account

Screenshot the account and anything it has sent before you do anything else. Then search the photos it uses: a face search often shows the same photos on two or three sibling accounts, and all of them belong in the report. Report through the platform's impersonation form, which every major app has; the fake account guide explains what each form asks for, and the reporting guide links to each one. If the account is contacting your child's friends, ask the school to warn parents through its own channels rather than posting the screenshots yourself.

Which plan fits

Rules that apply to you

• Search your own face and your own children's faces, with their knowledge. Not their friends, not their classmates, not the person running a fake account.
• Use what you find to protect: report, request removal, warn the school. Do not contact the operator of a fake account or anyone whose photo appears alongside your child's.
• Keep screenshots for reports and the police, and nowhere else. Posting them spreads the image and can expose other children in it.
• If a result points to intimate or sexual content involving a minor, do not download or forward it. Report the URL to the CyberTipline and the platform; that is the only correct route.
• Delete scans when the problem is resolved. A history of your child's searches is not something to keep around.