We have all seen them: friends and celebrities posting photos of themselves now, and years in the future. Everyone from the Jonas Brothers; to Heidi Klum and Busy Philipps is jumping on the Faceapp craze. According to the latest data, Faceapp has been download more than 100 million times and is now the number one ranked app on the iOS App Store in 121 countries.
However, experts are warning the general public to take caution. The Russian-owned app’s terms of service pose a serious threat to privacy. While FaceApp’s users still own their own “user content” (read: face), the company owns a never-ending and irrevocable royalty-free license to do anything they want with it… in front of whoever they wish.
“You might end up on a billboard somewhere in Moscow, but your face will most likely end up training some AI facial-recognition algorithm,” tech guru Peter Kostadinov told Forbes.
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Recent lessons from viral Facebook apps – such as Cambridge Analytica – is that the data they collect is not often used for the purposes that users might assume. And, that the data collected is not always stored securely, safely or privately.
“To make FaceApp actually work, you have to give it permissions to access your photos – ALL of them. But it also gains access to Siri and Searches… Oh, and it has access to refreshing in the background – so even when you are not using it, it is using you,” digital security expert revealed.
Meanwhile, the US Democratic National Committee instead reportedly sent out an alert warning 2020 Democratic presidential campaigns from using the app due to concerns about the app’s Russian developers, according to a report from CNN. While Senator Chuck Schumer has officially asked the FBI and FTC to conduct a national security investigation into FaceApp.
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