FaceApp and other fun stuff
FACEApp is the most recent mobile application to have gone viral these days. All of us are probably bored out of our wits, suffering cabin fever because of the lockdown and desperately needing some sort of distraction. It is indeed very amusing to see how pretty ( or ugly) you or someone else could be like when you use the app to transform the original picture to that of the opposite sex.
As a result of its popularity and wide acceptance of use, a lot of articles have come out warning of the dangers that the application poses in terms of security and privacy. One of the major factors in these suspicions is that the developers are from Russia, and we know how notorious and sophisticated Russian hackers are. So, people freaked out at this even though there was no sufficient basis.
Fortunately, because of all the excitement and paranoia generated by the said application, a thorough and more scientific analysis was done by some concerned organizations and good news for FaceApp users — nothing “at the moment” seems to indicate that your data are being stored except for possibly the single photo you submitted, which the developers claim is used to enhance the performance or response time of the application.
The test involved monitoring the behavior of the phone to see what it was doing, if it was transmitting unusual amounts of information and where the data was being transmitted — all while keeping FaceApp running in the background. The result was that no unusual ( big) amount of data was transmitted and that the application was using the usual cloud services provided by Google and Amazon — not in Russia.
FaceApp released the following statement:
“1. FaceApp performs most of the photo processing in the cloud. We only upload a photo selected by a user for editing. We never transfer any other images from the phone to the cloud.
“2. 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.
“3. We accept requests from users for removing all their data from our servers. Our support team is currently overloaded, but these requests have our priority. For the fastest processing, we recommend sending the requests from the FaceApp mobile app using ‘Settings>Support>Report a bug’ with the word ‘privacy’ in the subject line. We are working on the better UI (user interface) for that.
“4. All FaceApp features are available without logging in and you can log in only from the settings screen. As a result, 99 percent of users don’t log in; therefore, we don’t have access to any data that could identify a person.
“5. We don’t sell or share any user data with any third parties.
“6. Even though the core R& D ( research and development) team is located in Russia, the