NEW ORLEANS — Have you ever wanted to see your older self? An app, showing a realistic image of what you'd look like in the future, is spreading like wildfire on social media. However, there are concerns with the app that may make you think twice about downloading it.
Saints players, celebrities, even the Channel 4 news team, people from all over have jumped on the FaceApp bandwagon. The app realistically alters photos you submit. It changes your hair style, gender, and age (among other things).
It can be a lot of fun, but there are concerns, like if the company, based in Russia, has access to your photos and other data on your phone.
"At the root of it all really, is bio-metrics security, if you're essentially giving info about your face to others," said Tulane Professor Tom Thomas.
Thomas says, just like with any app, people need to be cautious.
"I would say the consumers need to be aware that any information that you put on any mobile device becomes a currency," he said. It becomes a currency for governments, a currency for companies and what they're doing with that information, your information, is something you should be concerned about. I think like with any app, you don't need to be concerned about who owns it or where they're located, but you need to be concerned with those privacy agreements where they outline the information they get from you and what data they're pulling."
A FaceApp statement, on TechCrunch.com, addresses users' uneasiness. It says:
"We are receiving a lot of inquiries regarding our privacy policy and therefore, would like to provide a few points that explain the basics:
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 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% 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 team is located in Russia, the user data is not transferred to Russia.
Additionally, we'd like to comment on one of the most common concerns: all pictures from the gallery are uploaded to our servers after a user grants access to the photos (for example,
https://twitter.com/joshuanozzi/status/1150961777548701696). We don't do that. We upload only a photo selected for editing. You can quickly check this with any of network sniffing tools available on the internet."
"I'm as guilty as anybody where I find an application or program that I want to use and well, I want to use it, I don't read, I'm guilty of just clicking right through it to get to the app and have a little fun with it. But that's really, in today's day in age not what we should be doing we should be cognizant of whether people want our information, and they're going to do what they can to get it. A lot of applications will, say, take for example your browser history.
They want to know where you're going, what are you clicking on what are you interested in? Are you clicking on sports? If sports, what sports team? Are you interested in cooking? If so, what kind of cooking? And all that big data gets generated and can be used to predict certain behaviors amongst population these days. FaceApp though, they're pulling information about your face and this is private data. So everything you put online becomes not private, so you have to be concerned with the privacy of your information if you're comfortable releasing that information."
So as you snap, click and share, be aware. Because these pictures are worth more than laughs, they could be worth your privacy.