FaceApp is the most popular free application on Google Play and the Apple App Store thanks to an age filter that makes the people who appear in the photos look much older, as if it were a future vision of it. But while countless photos of celebrities and occasional users of this application flood the networks since last week, there are growing concerns about the way FaceApp handles user data.
Is FaceApp stealing our data?
In recent days, the #faceappchallenge has taken over social networks. This “challenge” involves downloading a selfie editing tool called FaceApp and using one of its filters to digitally age your face. Then you have to post the photo of your ‘old self’ on the internet and everyone laughs … You get a little surge of dopamine from collecting a few “likes” and little else. Challenge completed.
However, when this app went viral, Joshua Nozzi, a software developer, warned those who were using it to “be careful with Facepp because it immediately loads photos without asking.” Some media picked up on this claim and concerns about the privacy of the application began to arise.
The concern was further intensified when some began to point out the fact that FaceApp is Russian. “The app you are voluntarily giving all your facial data to says the company’s location is in St. Petersburg, Russia,” tweeted Charlie Warzel of the New York Times. The controversy increased on the Internet.
According to various security researchers, there is no evidence that the app is stealing our data.
FaceApp responded to the controversy by stating that it “could store” some uploaded photos in the cloud for “performance and traffic” reasons. He also said that while the “core R&D team for the app is located in Russia, user data is not transferred to Russia.”
So is everything okay?
Should we feel free to participate in the #faceappchallenge without worrying about our photos being misused? Well … not exactly . In accordance with FaceApp’s terms of service, when we use the app, we grant you “perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide” permission to do whatever you want with photos. However, while this can be horrible, it is worth noting that it is the same as the privacy policy of basically every other service and technology platform.
If you have refused to participate in the #faceappchallenge because you were concerned about privacy, well that’s fine but, anyway, your face is probably already in a database somewhere, helping to train artificial intelligences. For example, on Google.
In May, Google researchers revealed that they had used 2,000 YouTube videos of people doing the dummy challenge (the viral challenge where you stand still) to help train an AI model to predict the depth of an object. moving on a video. The researchers also published their dataset for future research, which means that it is not said how that data will be used in the future.
You don’t even have to upload anything to the internet for your photo to end up as AI training. Earlier this year, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs reported secretly photographing students for a facial recognition study. Images were obtained from more than 1,700 people between 2012-2013 without their knowledge or consent . Those photos were included in a data set used to train facial recognition algorithms. Funding for this dataset came from the United States military and intelligence agencies.
The moral of this story, then, is that you shouldn’t worry too much about a Russian app. You should worry about everything, in general, on the net. We are just beginning to understand the extent to which we live in a surveillance society.
