FaceApp: harmless fun or Kremlin plot?
If you have ever wanted to know what you might look like in old age, now you can, said Bryony Gordon in The Daily Telegraph. Thanks to a new feature on
FaceApp, all you need do is upload a selfie, and the free-to-download app will use AI based on machine learning to show your face as it’s likely to look with the passage of decades. A host of celebrities have taken part in the so-called “age challenge” – giving fans a “glimpse into an alternate reality where Botox and fillers don’t exist” – starting a new craze. Some 140 million people have downloaded FaceApp (12 million of them over just ten days) and social media is awash with the results.
It’s very seductive, said Jemima Lewis in the same paper: the results are remarkably plausible, and “who can resist the opportunity to see into their own future”? But last week, tech-savvy users checked the terms of service most of us ignore, and asked: why would you give a little-known Russian firm “perpetual, irrevocable” licence to “use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, distribute and display” your image? Even if people don’t believe that these selfies are being collected on behalf of a foreign regime for some nefarious purpose, they should surely be worried about fraud, given that we could soon be using facial recognition software to do everything from starting our cars to accessing our bank accounts.
A lot of Americans were scared by the Russian connection, said Kara Swisher in The New York Times. Last week, the Democratic National Committee – which has experience of Russian hacking – urged its staff to delete the app. And many won’t have been reassured by the firm’s claim that it deletes “most” of the photos off its servers within 48 hours. But those servers are in the US, not Russia – and there is no evidence of a Kremlin plot, said Molly Roberts in The Washington Post. FaceApp is just doing what tech firms do: tempting people to give up their personal information in exchange for fun and convenience. We’ve had countless warnings about this, yet still we hand over untold data, without asking how much it’s worth to the firms that harvest it, or what they want it for.