What is FaceApp?
FaceApp is simply a mobile application made by a mobile application development company named wireless lab based in Russia. You can easily use FaceApp to transform faces present in images to make it smile, alter its age and change its gender accordingly. The most interesting thing about FaceApp is its ability to add a significant amount of realism in all the transformations. The App gained huge popularity due to its flawless artificial intelligent services. Launched in both the mobile app development versions that are android and IOS it has also faced a lot of controversies due to data privacy concerns.
Since its launch in 2017, FaceApp has been downloaded and used by more than 100 million people around the world due to its unique features. The whole world is mesmerized by its visualization technique and ahead of age algorithms that can effectively detect facial features and manipulate it according to the demands of the users.
Why FaceApp has been facing concerns?
The popular application has been facing several criticisms citing reasons such as data privacy, racism and ethnicity filters. However, company founder Yaroslav Goncharov has given suitable explanations to pacify the rising concerns of the users and investigation agencies such as the FBI.
The founders have clearly stated that all the user’s data and uploaded images are being processed in highly secure well known private servers such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Additionally, founders have apologized in the matters of racism and ethnic differentiation calling it an unintended behavior of the underlying neural network and immediately fixed the matter.
What are some of the benefits of using FaceApp?
You can enjoy yourselves manipulating the face photos or use it profession purposes. FaceApp offers you many choices to manipulate uploaded photos through editor options such as adding impressions, makeup, hair colors, smiles, changing hairstyles, glasses, and the beard. One of the most fascinating options is the aging option which can forecast your future face with much accuracy or can take you to your younger face view.
The popularity of FaceApp can be judged by the fact that its aging filter has been used by celebrities such as Drake, Hillary Duff, Gordon Ramsay, and Lebron James to showcase their future faces on social media. You can also use it for professional purposes such as photography and designing due to its various artificial intelligence services such as filters, lens blur, overlays, backgrounds, tattoos, and vignettes.
The LGBT and transgender communities are thankful to the FaceApp for introducing features such as gender change transformation. Moreover, troll lovers and social media addicts love it due to its capability to quickly transform any given image according to the mentioned specifications and background.
How it works and what it offers?
FaceApp offers magazines cover high-quality portraits and images for any face image just by tapping a few times.
Isn’t it great!!!
FaceApp is powered by its unconventional artificial intelligence service that is proclaimed to be the most advanced neural portrait editing technology available in the market.
Now you can anytime improvise your selfie or can have unlimited fun by using the gender swap feature.
You can edit and share face images among friends, family and general audience by styling hair according to your wishes along with other amazing free transformations.
Any user can make improvements and have fun through the following available features.
- Create Hollywood-ready selfies along with the impression filters
- Apply your favorite evening or day makeup
- Perform suitable hair color and styling changes
- Finding your perfect mustache/beard style
- Apply an attractive smile along with replacing the background
- Try out fascinating tools such as color filters and lens blur
- Swap your genders and have loads of fun
- Enable the AI to find the best hairstyle and color for you
- Modify your age and add marvelous tattoos
Why should we worry using FaceApp?
Interestingly yes, there exist some reasons for us to worry using FaceApp. Several issues have been raised by many public and private organizations regarding the breach of privacy and data security by the data processing unit of FaceApp. Any application or software which gathers data points especially linked to facial recognition must be considered a matter of high concern especially when its usage is in the hands of government agencies. After the great scandal of the meddling of the US elections by Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, there has been mistrust among all regarding the data security concerns.
Cybersecurity experts have raised many serious risks regarding the sharing of private information with FaceApp. The privacy policy of FaceApp notifies its service providers and affiliates that it may transfer your data inclusive of private information across any country. This means that your personal information may travel from your country to any other country and jurisdiction around the world across the borders. The particular matter has been a high-level concern especially regarding all the companies based in Russia. The Russian government is known to have a habit of forcing the hands of Russia based enterprises whenever they sought to have inappropriate access to the data and servers of the enterprise.
While using FaceApp your photo can easily be used overseas inclusive of the Russian government who has already been accused of serious interference in the US elections of 2016. You are required to upload their photo to the FaceApp cloud which is purely based in Russia whose laws concerning data protection and privacy are completely different from the world. The company has not defined any privacy policy to safeguard user content stored on its servers located in the United States of America.
Now the privacy of your data is completely in the hands of United States-based companies such as Amazon and Google. After the scandal involving a breach of personal data by Facebook people have been more aware and concern regarding their private information and so is in the case of facial recognition app FaceApp.
How FaceApp handles your data?
FaceApp agreement and terms of service reveal that the company holds irrevocable and perpetual rights over all your uploaded photos. That means that FaceApp generally creates identity morphing images by uploading all your photos directly to its cloud servers instead of processing the data right on your phone. Many kinds of research have claimed that your selfies can be easily used by hackers to crack the facial identification system used to secure your smartphones.
Similar to FaceApp a popular application TikTok was known to divert the private information of users to China which has stringent laws regarding data security and privacy. Hackers can easily break into your bank account if provided with your facial data. There is a substantial amount of risk as there is a strong possibility that the Russian government is using the company’s data to advance its surveillance and facial recognition capabilities. According to reports given by secret investigation agencies, there is a huge marketplace of fake identity proofs and identification documents on the dark side of the web powered by images of our faces.
Now FaceApp along with other applications such as Instagram and Snapchat creates huge risks of counterfeiting and identity thefts as it lures people into taking ID style pictures of themselves. FaceApp states that it deletes most images from its server within 48 hours but its privacy policy contradicts the statement. The privacy policy of FaceApp allows it to keep your photos indefinitely without selling or sharing with the third parties. The privacy policy generates huge risks for us as the real photos can easily be used to create fake profiles along with sowing of undesired and dangerous confusion on social media.
Summary and Future Implications
It has been time for the regulators to step in and draw strict regulations for companies regarding how our data is collected and shared at the global level. The authorities should not just wait for the damage to be done instead they must become more conscious and sensitive to the existent risks.
