SPOTLIGHT

Faceapp creates buzz on social media, security concern remains

If you are keen to know how you will look when you turn old, then there is a new Russia-based Artificial Intelligence (Ai)-powered selfieediting app — Faceapp — that hints how you may look in your later life, through an age-based filter.

Launched in 2017, Faceapp is developed by a Russian company called Wireless Lab and uses AI to add filters to photos. It has taken social media by storm. It can also be used to add beards, hair colours and swap genders among other transformations. The app has been downloaded by over 100k million users on Android.

With the ongoing #Faceappchallenge that involves people using the app to augment their face by a couple of decades, the app is witnessing a lot of attention on social media. Several celebrities like Nick Jonas, Varun Dhawan and Arjun Kapoor have also posted their Faceapp edited pictures on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

According to a report published in The Verge, users have been surprised to learn that the app’s creators are harvesting metadata from their photos. However, Close research suggests that Faceapp isn’t doing anything particularly unusual in either its code or its network traffic, so if the users are worried about Faceapp, there are probably a bunch of other apps on your phone doing the same thing.

To use the app, IOS users select

specific photos they want to put filters on, and there’s no evidence of the app downloading a user’s entire photo roll. The company then uploads the specific images to its servers to apply the filter.

Faceapp never spells out that it’s downloading the filtered photo, but it’s not unusual, as IOS researcher and CEO of Guardian Firewall Will Strafach noted on Twitter.

Digital forensics expert Gavin Manes also said Faceapp only has access to the photos you upload and the company claims it deletes most of those pictures after 48 hours. “Whether that’s true or not, it’s very difficult to delete data,” Manes said. “Just like when you delete a file of your computer, is it really gone?” Manes said if you create an actual account, the terms and conditions change, and the company may have more access to your phone.

According to a recent report, police forces in the Netherlands have backtracked on calls for users to delete the popular agefiltering Faceapp, over which some critics have voiced privacy fears. In a series of posts on Facebook, it was erroneously claimed by forces across the country that the Russian app, which predicts how people will look as they get older, was not safe as it would not be bound by European privacy legislation. “We want to warn you about this, at first glance, innocent app. Faceapp is the product of a Russian company. European privacy legislation is therefore not applicable here,” the police wrote. “By using Faceapp, an enormous amount of data is collected. Such as photos, IP addresses, specific data from your smartphone, and cookies are also placed. European privacy legislation is therefore not applicable here. That is why we advise you to remove the Faceapp from your phone!”

But the forces in Maastricht, Limburg, Schagen and Den Helder were forced to issue a clarification after experts highlighted the inaccuracy in their claims. The development highlights the challenges faced by law enforcement authorities across the world in keeping up with the online world and the wealth of complex legislation being produced in order to crack potential cybercrime. ■

team@mymobile.co.in