Virus application FaceApp provides Russian companies with wide access to your data

The Russian application FaceApp in recent days has gained viral popularity due to its filter, which changes the user's age in a photo, but the conditions of its use raise concerns about privacy.

Фото: Depositphotos

The application has gained immense popularity, allowing users to change their age in the photo: from rejuvenation to aging. Even celebrities have joined this digital flash mob by posting photos of themselves in their youth or old age. Over a million users have downloaded the application from Google Play, in addition, FaceApp is now the number one application in the “Photos and Videos” section of the Apple Store, writes Fox 11.

But according to the use conditions of FaceApp, users give the application permission to use, modify, adapt, and publish any images that the user suggests for processing artificial intelligence.

Lawyer Elizabeth Potts Weinstein wrote in Twitter: “If you use #FaceApp, you give them the right to use your photos, your name and your login for any purpose, including commercial (on a billboard or in Internet advertising).”

“You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content,” FaceApp's terms of use for the app state.

There it is expressly stated that, using the services of the application, "you agree that user content can be used for commercial purposes."

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The application, which was created in 2017 by the Wireless Lab in St. Petersburg, Russia, also has the right to retain user content even after he deleted the application.

Ariel Hochstadt, a security expert and former marketing manager at Gmail, said that he had previously warned people about such applications.

"Hackers can collect data from the sites people visit and record the actions they take on those sites, but they don't always know who those users are," he said.

“Imagine that they can now use a phone camera to secretly record the activities of a young gay man who visits gay sites but has not yet come out to the public about his orientation, and they can now link his face to the sites he uses,” explained expert.

“They also know who is in the image and have a huge user-generated database on Facebook. So the data they have on that person is personal and accurate in terms of name, city and other details that can be found on Facebook,” he added.

The application may still have access to photos on the iOS platform, even if the user has set permissions to use photos to Never, because Apple allows the application to call this API, even if the user has restricted access to the photos.

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However, many other people point out that FaceApp has conditions similar to other widely used applications.

Elliot Alderson, a French security researcher, published in Twitter Terms of use.

“You also grant us a perpetual license to create derivative works from, promote, publish, broadcast, sublicense, publicly use and publicly display the content in any form and in any media or distribution method (now known or later developed),” says Snapchat's terms and conditions.

This means that you will not be entitled to any compensation from Snap Inc. if your name, image or voice was used by the platform for your purposes.

These applications are vivid examples of how much information people distribute on the Internet using the “free” service that actually earns their content.

“Your face is now a form of copyright, and you need to be very careful when you give permission to access your biometric data,” said Steve Sammartino, a business technology expert.

According to him, soon the facial recognition system can be used to access accounts or other important things, and many people will regret giving these companies biometric keys free of charge.

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