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A NORTH Yorkshire school has banned the use of full facial images of pupils over fears they will be used by criminal gangs for child abuse.
Malton School has introduced a new policy to safeguard the privacy of students against photographs being put through AI and used against them.
The guidelines were highlighted during last week's A-level results and today's (Thursday) GCSEs where students' faces were only partially shown.
Headteacher Rob Williams said: "We are working through our website and social media presence to change towards new approaches that do not show full facial images that can be used by criminal gangs for child abuse."
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"It will take a bit of time but I suspect this is something that all schools will have to be doing soon if they haven't already started."
Recent media coverage has raised concern about the use of pupil photographs on school websites and social media.
Reports have highlighted warnings from child protection experts, the National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation about criminals misusing publicly available images of children, including through AI image manipulation and blackmail attempts.
The latest guidance from the UK Online Harms Early Warning Working Group focuses on responsible management, sharing and protection of photos and videos of children across school websites, social media and other digital spaces.
"It recommends measures including avoiding identifiable information, using harder-to-misuse imagery, applying privacy settings, removing image metadata, and embedding image security into staff training and policies.
The UK Safer Internet Centre has published new guidance to help schools protect pupil images online, following a confirmed incident in the country where photographs from a school website were copied and manipulated using AI, and the school then received threats linked to that misuse.
A spokesperson for the Centre said: "This advice is not intended to stop schools celebrating pupils or sharing positive achievements.
"Instead, it supports schools to do so in ways that reduce unnecessary safeguarding and data-protection risks, particularly given the rapid development of AI image-generation tools. The same principles apply to images shared on school social media accounts.
"The guidance highlights practical steps schools can take to reduce risk, including avoiding face-on, clearly identifiable photographs of pupils, never pairing names with images, removing metadata (such as time and location data) before uploading images and using low-resolution images on websites and social media."
A spokesperson for North Yorkshire Council said: "It is up to individual schools as to what they provide. As a side, they will get their own consents."