Activity providers have been told to audit the photographs already on their websites
You can do that without showing less of what you do.
You do not have to show less of what you do. You can remove the identity instead.
Aidos is the UK’s first and only AI safeguarding platform built solely to protect children’s identities in published photographs.
Before an image goes out, Aidos finds the real child’s face and replaces it with a realistic synthetic face. The replacement is permanent and there is no recoverable original.
The costume stays. The stage lights stay. The climbing wall, the medal, the face mid-laugh at the end of a long week: all of it stays.
The costume, the venue and the moment remain. The child’s real facial identity doesn’t.
So a parent deciding where to send their child still sees children who are plainly happy to be there, and the photograph does not hand a stranger a face, a name and a venue in one file.
Before and after images use licensed stock photography. No child from a customer setting appears on this page.
What the UK Safer Internet Centre actually asked for. It starts with an audit.
On 8 May 2026 the UK Safer Internet Centre published guidance on protecting a setting’s images from AI manipulation and abuse. The Centre is a partnership between Childnet International, the Internet Watch Foundation and South West Grid for Learning, and the guidance was drafted by the UK Online Harms Early Warning Working Group, whose members include the NSPCC, the National Crime Agency’s CEOP Education, the Lucy Faithfull Foundation and the Marie Collins Foundation.
It is written for “education settings and organisations working with children and young people”. That is camps, clubs, dance and stage schools, and every activity business that publishes a gallery.
One line in its checklist is the one most organisations skip:
“Schedule regular, documented audits of children and young people’s imagery (e.g. termly or biannual) on websites, social media and promotional materials.”
Read the guidance in full. We use their words rather than our own, because on a question like this the source matters.
The guidance is careful and worth reading properly. But look at what it offers when it comes to the photographs themselves: share them from a distance, blur them, take them over the shoulder, use group shots instead of anything face-on.
That is honest advice, and for an activity business it is a real cost. Your gallery is how a parent decides whether to book. A camp that stops showing faces stops showing what it is like to be there.
There is a third option, and the guidance does not have to name it for an operator to take it. Publish the photograph. Remove the identity.
The guidance is new. The exposure underneath it is not.
The Internet Watch Foundation, one of the three organisations behind that guidance, reports in its own research that tools now exist which can produce a realistic likeness of a specific child from as few as 20 existing images, in as little as 15 minutes.
Twenty images is one show gallery a term for a child who has been dancing with you since Year 2. One summer of weekly camp round-ups. One cast photograph after every production.
The risk is not created by the next photograph you publish. It is created by the accumulation of the ones already there. That is why the guidance asks you to look backwards before it asks you to change anything going forwards.
Most operators already have clear rules about who may take a photograph and with whose permission. The Department for Education’s code of practice for out-of-school settings asks for exactly that: a photography policy statement, parental consent, and an explanation to parents and carers of how you will use the images, where you will use them and how long you will keep them for.
Those are the right rules. They govern the moment of capture and the moment of consent.
Read that last one closely, because it is the whole problem in one line.
Consent decides whether you may publish a child’s image. It has nothing to say about what happens to that image afterwards.
A signed form is a permission, correctly obtained and properly recorded. It is not a control. It does not travel with the file, it cannot be enforced against a stranger, and it cannot be withdrawn from a copy somebody else already holds.
How Aidos protects the images of the children in your care.
The protection happens before an image is published, not after it has gone out.
- The real child’s face is replaced with a realistic synthetic face, permanently, with no recoverable original.
- Aidos produces five protected versions of each image. Your team chooses which one is published.
- Image metadata is removed, so the file no longer carries the location and device information written into it when the photograph was taken.
- Images are encrypted during upload and download.
- Processing takes place on secure infrastructure hosted in Ireland (Amazon Web Services).
- Images uploaded by settings are never used to train models.
- Aidos is a closed system, so images can only be uploaded and viewed from inside an authenticated account.
What Aidos does not do. Set against the guidance’s own checklist.
Aidos protects published identity. It answers one line of the checklist and leaves the rest to you.
| The guidance asks about | Aidos |
|---|---|
| Images that identify a child by face or by name | Removes the face. The names in your captions are still yours to manage. |
| Auditing what is already published | Makes the answer easier, because you no longer have to choose between the photograph and the child. |
| Consent, storage, retention, staff training, incident response | Nothing. These are your policy, and Aidos does not touch them. |
It also does not remove images already in circulation. Nothing can. That is the reason the guidance is worth acting on now rather than after an incident.
If a supplier tells you it can solve the whole of this guidance, it has not read the guidance.
“The online sexual abuse of children is reaching pandemic levels, and the emergence of AI is fuelling the demand. Aidos is using AI for good, to prevent the innocent images of children hosted on school websites being turned into child sex abuse material to extort the image host and destroy a child’s life.
Aidos can prevent this form of sexual extortion in its tracks, which is why I am supporting them and their vision for a safer online world.”
See what Aidos does to a photograph you have already published
Before. The original photograph carries the child’s real facial identity.
After Aidos. The venue, the activity and the moment remain. The real face has been replaced with a realistic synthetic face.
Before and after images use licensed stock photography. No child from a customer setting appears on this page.
Try Aidos with your own images
Run a photograph you have already published, and see what it looks like with the identity removed.
You will need an account before you can upload anything. Aidos is a closed system, so images can only be uploaded and viewed from inside an authenticated account, and the free trial is how you get one.
Pricing starts at £295 a year for 100 images. If you need more or fewer, we will work out pricing that fits.