FaceApp is a mobile application for iOS and Android developed by the Russian company Wireless Lab. A team of developers from Saint Petersburg created the app that uses neural networks to photo manipulations by guessing where you’re likely to have wrinkles, how bald you’re bound to be, and how much your skin will droop in the future.
Considering the app’s popularity, most people seem to like the new face filter. Well-known rapper and actor Ludacris seemed to especially enjoy the app and joked around on Instagram. “Fast & Furious 50 and we still haven’t stopped at a gas station. Or for Diapers,” wrote Ludacris.
Vlada from the FaceApp Support team told Bored Panda in an interview that “the AI technology we use in our photo editing filters requires advanced calculations on a server, which makes impossible to alter a picture on a smartphone. The picture that wasn't edited with our filters won't be sent to the servers and will remain on your device only. Please note that we do not have access to any additional data, such as email address, device model, Apple ID or iCloud, or Google accounts.”
She also explained that “all pictures are automatically deleted within the next 48 hours after they were edited in our app. We cannot and we do not store pictures that our users upload. The images shared with the servers are totally anonymous and stored encrypted. We cannot identify you, your device or any other data based on the pictures. We do not use them in advertising nor in any other public cases. No one sees these pictures, they are processed automatically by computers only.”
The FaceApp first went viral around two years ago and recently became very popular among popular celebrities and Internet users once more. Previously, the app came under fire for being ‘racist’ because it had filters that change your race and a ‘hot’ filter that lightened a person’s skin tone. This time, there are different controversies surrounding the app and its creators, with plenty of panic-inducing tin foil hat theories floating about.
Social media was all abuzz with speculation that the FaceApp developers had links to the Russian government and were stealing your phone data and secretly creating a massive database of faces for surveillance. Sounds a bit like the scenario for a James Bond movie, no?
Luckily, some of these theories were quickly debunked. While the app is Russian-made, it doesn’t automatically mean its developers are spies. Users were also panicking that the app might upload the phone’s entire camera roll in the background, but this turned out to be false: FaceApp only uploads the photos you want it to. However, what might concern users is that FaceApp keeps a copy of the photo you use a filter on. This is because the app edits them on its servers with complex algorithms that can’t be installed on your phone. On the other hand, the risk of your data being misused by FaceApp isn’t higher than when using any other app.
“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,” FaceApp wrote in its statement. “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.”
The company added that “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. We don't sell or share any user data with any third parties. Even though the core R&D team is located in Russia, the user data is not transferred to Russia.”
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