FaceApp, a mobile application that can realistically transform the photo of a person’s face using artificial intelligence, has come under harsh attacks in international media under claims that users’ personal data could be misused.
Launched in St Petersburg in 2017 by Wireless Lab (which is now a resident of Russia’s largest tech park Skolkovo), FaceApp has drawn international media attention with its ageing feature. Using this filter, millions of users worldwide can change their photographs to have a glimpse of how they could look like with ageing. What made the app stand out from dozens of similar apps is the fact that the transformed images usually look very realistic.
Once FaceApp went viral, some politicians stepped in to point out alleged threats coming from this application. Thus last week US Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer asked the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission to conduct an investigation into FaceApp. In his belief, the app poses “national security and privacy risks for millions of US citizens,” since its users “must provide the company full and irrevocable access to their personal photos and data.”
Schumer added that FaceApp’s location in Russia raised “questions regarding how and when the company provides access to the data of US citizens to third parties, including potential foreign governments.” The senator then warned all Americans that if they use FaceApp their facial data “could fall into the hands of something like Russian intelligence or military.”
Now rumor has it that once a user uploads a photo to FaceApp, the application gets access to all the photographs on the user’s smartphone, without the possibility to revoke such access.
As a result of such a coverage in the news, the app’s downloads rate dropped by 33.27% compared to the month before. The number of monthly downloads, however, still stands far above two million, according to Apptopia.
In a statement addressing the controversy, FaceApp assured that only photos chosen by the users are uploaded to the cloud for photo processing. According to the statement, most uploaded photos are deleted less than 48 hours after being uploaded to the servers.
The company also specified that users may, upon request, delete all of their uploaded images. Such requests have become so numerous that FaceApp’s support team is “currently overloaded,” these requests being “a priority.”
FaceApp assured that they do not sell or share any user data with any third parties, adding that even though the core R&D team is located in Russia, the user data is not transferred to Russia.
“Stop using FaceApp”
Tiffany Li, a technology attorney and legal scholar, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, said users should rather be worried about the FaceApp’s general privacy protection model. People should “stop using FaceApp because there are no controls on how your face data is used. But also – walking around anywhere can get your face included in facial recognition databases. So … stop going outside? This privacy protection model doesn’t work,” she twitted.
In a comment published by Russian daily Novaya Gazeta, Russian journalist and tech expert Sergey Golubitsky called “paranoia” the global controversy sparked by FaceApp, underlining that the app gets a rather limited amount of personal data from its users compared to others photo apps. Google’s photo app, in particular, can view contacts and even edit them; receive access to user geo data and download files without any user notification, Golubitsky noted.
It is not the first time FaceApp comes under fire. In 2017, it sparked criticism for a filter allowing users to alter someone’s ethnicity in selfies.
Back in 2016, another Russian photo app called ‘FindFace’ sparked controversy in Russia over what was perceived as the destructive power of new technologies with regards to user privacy.
