If you're one of the many people who have recently downloaded the latest social media craze, FaceApp, you also agreed to some unsettling terms and conditions.
FaceApp uses facial recognition technology to alter people's
selfies to make them change gender, look older or younger, or swap faces with
someone else. After going viral in 2017, and gathering more than 80 million
active users' data, the recent "FaceApp Challenge", where celebrities
and other social media users have been using the app's old-age filter to alter
their photos, has revived the popularity of the app.
While this may sound harmless, the app's developers added
terms and conditions that give them permission to use each user's likeness,
name, and username, for any purpose, as long as they want, even if the app is deleted.
Concerns are heightened by the fact that the developers are located in Russia.
Some speculate that the app could be helping the Russians curate a database of
photorealistic avatars that, when paired with bots, could result in convincing
fake profile on social media. Some are also accusing FaceApp of uploading
users’ entire photo libraries to its own servers.
On July 17th, Senate Democrat, Charles E. Schumer, wrote in
a letter to the FBI and Federal Trade Commission that he's concerned FaceApp could
pose "national security and privacy risks for millions of U.S. citizens."
The New York Democrat is asking the two agencies to assess the situation.
FaceApp founder Yaroslav Goncharov told HuffPost in an
emailed statement it’s doing no such thing.
"We don't sell or share any user data with any third
parties," he said. "Even though the core R&D team is located in
Russia, the user data is not transferred to Russia. We might store an uploaded
photo in the cloud. The main reason for that is performance and traffic: we
want to make sure that the user doesn't upload the photo repeatedly for every
edit operation. Most images are deleted from our servers within 48 hours from
the upload date."
The most important takeaway from this situation is to always
check the credibility of every app before downloading it, and always read
through the terms and conditions before agreeing to them. If you read the Terms
of Service for each of your installed apps and go to the permission and privacy
settings for each app, you might be shocked at what apps have access to.
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Article information provided by Inspired eLearning