The privacy scandal du jour revolves around FaceApp, an app for iOS and Android that allows users to automatically digitally alter their photographs to look older, younger, change hairstyles, facial hair, glasses, or more. In order to make FaceApp work, users had to grant the app access to their photos, either from their devices’ camera roll or social media account. Then the magic happens, multiplied by the 100 million or so people who have downloaded the app so far.
However, recent examinations into FaceApp’s policies raise new and troubling questions about what FaceApp can and will do with our photos, and whether there’s anything we can do to stop them. Well, these questions may be troubling but they aren’t new: FaceApp first went viral back in 2017, before the Internet forgot it exists just like everything else.
This most recent freakout comes amid the realization that FaceApp is owned by a Russian company and that their terms of use essentially grant FaceApp the right to access and use our photos, as well as the “perpetual, irrevocable” right to use any photos that they processed for us. This, paired with the fact that FaceApp uploads the photos being processed to their server, sparked fear and outrage just as quickly as the old-age photos dominated social media.
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