Norad Santa tracker now asks parents to upload children's faces thanks to OpenAI

OpenAI has partnered with NORAD for this year’s NORAD Tracks Santa event, introducing a set of holiday-themed ChatGPT tools. One of them, “Elf Enrollment,” invites parents to upload a child’s photo to generate an “official Santa’s helper” portrait. The feature is marketed as a harmless seasonal novelty, but it immediately raises questions about how children’s facial data is handled, retained, or used. OpenAI has faced repeated scrutiny over training data, image ingestion, and model improvement through user submissions. The idea of a government-linked Christmas program steering families toward uploading minors’ faces into a commercial AI system is triggering a wave of concern.

The other tools in the collaboration avoid biometric data, but Elf Enrollment highlights the broader issue: kids cannot consent, and parents are often unaware of how AI firms store or process uploaded images. Even if OpenAI promises limited use or deletion, the lack of transparent, verifiable guarantees remains a sticking point for many. Users on privacy-focused forums are questioning whether a decades-old holiday tradition should be repackaged into an image-upload funnel, especially at a time when regulators and security researchers are already warning about the long-term risks of building datasets involving children’s biometrics.