Personal data protection department assistant commissioner Mohd Shazrol Mohd Shah said it was feared that malicious people would have access to the images and later recognise the faces of the children of the owner of the phone number.

“WhatsApp profile pictures are to identify friends but we recommend that they put a nice picture of themselves,” he said.

Shazrol was speaking to Bernama after the Industry Information Sharing Session 2017, organised by the Communications and Multimedia Consumer Forum of Malaysia in conjunction with World Consumer Rights Day here yesterday.

Earlier, in his briefing, Shazrol advised parents not to put pictures of their children on social networking sites such as Facebook (FB) as this posed a crime risk.

“This is because although the picture in the FB account has been deleted, it is still stored as data in the overseas social media sites because the social networking site data is processed outside the country,” he said.