15 ms·

FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

355 points by ElectronShak 7y ago

jonas_kgomo 7y ago
Solid is a MIT project aiming to improve privacy and data ownership, founded with Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Perhaps this kind of initiatives and blockchain will remind people what valuable data they are sharing. Information Economy should directly incentivize those who share their identity, I couldnt imagine some stanger in the street asking me for all this information, and me giving it without a doubt. It is scary but it's normalized.
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break_the_bank 7y ago
It's worse when it has access to your picture because a friend thought it'd be funny. In that situation the App gets my picture without my consent.
- hsbaut76 7y ago
  Same
- benjaminva 7y ago
  Do friends need to enter the name along with the picture? How about the age? I haven't tested the app myself yet and probably will not.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
  This is the reason I have just stopped bothering about privacy. I meticulously guard which apps I share my phonebook with, while other idiots share their entire contacts folder (including my details) en-masse to apps like TrueCaller. It just feels so futile to even care.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    You're right, facebook and others can (and do!) infer people based on contact lists, even if you don't have a facebook account, if all your friends do then Facebook already knows who you are, who your friends are, you're likely interests (based off friends), etc. The best I figure I can do is to keep the apps I used locked down if possible - and to avoid "stupid" apps that clearly have little purpose other then dataharvesting. Cool Selfy app? Ehh pass.
- thecatspaw 7y ago
  Can a friend agree to these terms when it is my face, my name, and my private data though?
  - jkaplowitz 7y ago
    In many countries including the US, yes. If the right mixture of you, the company, and your friend are located in or deal with Europe or similar places, possibly not, but it very much depends on the details.
  - the_seraphim 7y ago
    Define private, you walk in public in front of security cameras wearing your face in public. your face is now public information. Your name is on your mail, your census, your driving licence, you provide your name and address to companies all the time. your name and address is now public information. If someone can tie your public face to your public name then thats public information. you dont like it, get a PO box and wear a mask all the time.
- code_duck 7y ago
  Didn't Facebook face tagging work the same for a long time? It would ask people to provide names for other people in their photos
  - corobo 7y ago
    Still does, at least partially. Facebook's always asking me if I want to tag certain people in their images... No Facebook, am no a grass
alunchbox 7y ago
Hmm. Would it be possible to run these Apps in a VM like container? allow it access a dummy, empty folder to read from somewhat of a container for all apps? then there would be a manual transfer process between the shared folders after you've saved an image? So when downloading an App it will ask would you want to run this in an isolated environment? and you can, so if it tries to scan over your photo gallery it will have an empty folder etc..
- penagwin 7y ago
  This is a scoping issue. On iOS devices at least no app has access to your photo gallery unless they explicitly prompt you for permission. That said, many apps need access to the photo gallery - say I want to put a screenshot into discord. The issue is that now Discord has access to ALL of my photos. There needs to be more scoping options. "Allow access to previous 12 photos while you're using the app" kinda deal.
  - ajconway 7y ago
    On iOS is't possible to ask the system to present a photo picker on behalf of the app without requiring a permission to look into your photos.
    - eswat 7y ago
      So I’ve heard about this feature before but I’m not sure it actually exists? From the Photos app you can only share specific photos with specific apps that add themselves to the popout menu. If you disable Photos access to any of these apps they will just ask that you re-enable full photo access.
      - jclardy 7y ago
        It does exist, I have an app that manipulates photos and if you reject photos permission you can still use the photo picker and get access to one photo of the user's choice. You can't directly save to the photos library, but you can save it via a system share sheet. Most apps don't make that obvious though, and imply that they need full photos access to work (Or they don't give options to use the system picker/system share sheet.)
Rannath 7y ago
Aren't contracts with unlimited time periods non-binding? I was under the impression that any contract that said perpetual anything could be trivially disregarded. Or is that a regional thing?
- penagwin 7y ago
  It's almost certainly depends on the juridiction but I am curious on this. Also if any lawyers read this - If "perpetual" isn't binding, would say "The next 200 years" be binding? It's an explicit time period but effectively still "indefinite" for the lifetime of an individual.
  - jermaustin1 7y ago
    IANAL, but I've definitely heard of contracts between corporations being longer than the lifetime of an individual. Like UK leasehold properties [1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease
- bhouston 7y ago
  The language from their terms of service (https://faceapp.com/terms https://faceapp.com/terms) is this: > You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you. When you post or otherwise share User Content on or through our Services, you understand that your User Content and any associated information (such as your [username], location or profile photo) will be visible to the public. This is standard language that is generally enforceable. It is the license that is perpetual, not the contract.
  - cmarschner 7y ago
    Not in Europe. I’m sure lawyers are excited.
bhouston 7y ago
It should be worth millions to have pictures of 150M faces and associate them with names. If I had that I would sell it to the people running the in-store camera networks that identify customers into demographic categories and offer them this so that they can associate real identities. Another data broker, now of people's faces. I am surprised that this isn't yet done by the free make-up apps or even by snap chat. I guess there are people crawling Facebook and probably other profile services like LinkedIn, etc. But probably crawling these is not legal to resell.
stunt 7y ago
The coverage on FaceApp and the way they talk about it is ridiculous. When it comes for instance to Snapchat's numbers, the coverage is about the success of the company. How is FaceApp different than all other apps and social networks that are storing all your photos with location and tags to your friends except that FaceApp is a Russian company? I'm not defending FaceApp. I don't use social networks either for the same reasons. But this double standards in media is ridiculous in my opinion.
- hi5eyes 7y ago
  the only real difference between snap and faceapp is the media gave faceapp the russian tie in so now they're using it as that combined with federal investigation titles [1] snap is a scarier but most people dont care since its so ingrained into their lives... for whatever reason I never understood.. but my friends used love it even while I warned them how stupid it was so use snap in the first place if you cared about privacy what happens to snap.inc/your data when the userbase drops off completely.. inevitably like every other social media.. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/17/faceapp-gets-federal-attention-as-sen-schumer-raises-alarm-on-data-use/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/17/faceapp-gets-federal-atten...
  - marpstar 7y ago
    On top of that, FaceApp doesn't request Geolocation permissions while Snap integrates a map of friends in the app itself.
    - jmkni 7y ago
      The app doesn't request Geolocation data, but might the geographic info still be in the EXIF data in the photo that gets uploaded?
      - bengotow 7y ago
        Yep this is correct, location history can be scraped from the EXIF data in the photos in your camera roll.
mikeash 7y ago
We keep harping on about privacy, and then shit like this happens. There are two possible conclusions to draw. One is that the general public actually doesn’t care about privacy at all. It’s a niche concern. The other is that the general public cares but is completely and utterly clueless about how to defend themselves, to the point that an app can literally say “give us your name and face and we can do whatever we want with it in perpetuity throughout the universe” and people will happily oblige. I don’t know which one is correct but neither one is great.
- the_seraphim 7y ago
  Consider the stupidity of the average human. Then consider that half of the population is stupider than that
- Voloskaya 7y ago
  Option 3: No one read the terms of services, and 99% of the app users are not even aware of that, didn't even give it a passing thought.
  - swsieber 7y ago
    This. Caught me by surprise but in retrospect, of course an app is going to slip this in.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    That falls under the second option. Being capable of defending your privacy means understanding that you shouldn’t willingly give your personal info to random apps.
    - Voloskaya 7y ago
      They didn't 'willingly' give anything. Like any app, you launch it and you accept the EULA. Then it asks you for permission to use your camera and for your contacts: it makes sense you want to take selfies and share them. That's it, now all your data belong to them. There is no functional difference between an app that will siphon all your private data and an app that won't. for the vast majority of users, at no point did they stop and ponder whether they were ok giving up their 'face' for a filter app. The only way to know would be to read the terms, and even then if you are not a lawyer you won't see the traps (e.g. understanding that "User Content" actually refers to your face).
2_listerine_pls 7y ago
Facebook owns access to your face, body, name, friends, family, trips, events, conversations, location, groups, interests, political orientation, estimated IQ, payments, workplace, other sites you visit, etc... Yet, Forbes & others talk about FaceApp.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  > Yet, Forbes chooses to talk about FaceApp. https://www.forbes.com/search/?q=facebook https://www.forbes.com/search/?q=facebook
  - 2_listerine_pls 7y ago
    Obviously meant that there are many other elephants in the room and but they decided to promote an alarming article about this new app that records your photos!!! Is it so difficult for You to understand?
    - asdff 7y ago
      You want every article they put out to be about all the elephants at once? Because they've already put out articles about all the other elephants and continue to do so. This one just joined the zoo is all.
      - 2_listerine_pls 7y ago
        What is so alarming about another App doing the same? Why are major newspapers writing these overblown articles at the same time?
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imgabe 7y ago
Is "what your face looks like" private information? You publicly display your face everywhere you go all the time. It's not really practical to hide it. Likewise your name you pretty much freely give out to anyone who asks. Is that private information? So Faceapp knows "There's a person with this name who looks like this". Was that supposed to be a secret? I'm concerned about privacy too, but it seems like some people just want to hide under a rock for their entire lives. I don't know how anyone manages to leave the house if having people see your face and know your name is a serious concern.
- daenz 7y ago
  >Is "what your face looks like" private information? I think it's the linkage of the name and the face. Either of those things alone don't seem like private information, but together, I would argue they are private. I can't provide a good reason as to why I think that yet though.
  - Whatarethese 7y ago
    They publicly said that less than 1% of the users created an account and tied it to a name. Granted thats still hundreds of thousands but it nothing crazy.
- lolsal 7y ago
  Would a face be considered private in countries/cultures where women cover their face most of the time, or particularly in public? This is an honest question, I really do not know what I think.
- bagacrap 7y ago
  Faceapp knows what 150M faces look like. That concentration of information is valuable. Google built a fortune by taking freely available information and organizing it for easy access. In the case of faceapp there are many nefarious actors who could serve as clients.
  - stlark 7y ago
Raphmedia 7y ago
Every one I know is already using either Facebook Messenger (which has the same face scanning features) and/or Snapchat (which also has this feature). This is not new. I've been using FaceApp since its release. There are a lot of other similar apps that I've used in the past. Especially makeup simulator apps. BeautyPlus, YouCal, InstaBeauty, BeautyCam, Facetune, Photo Plastic, Visage Lab, etc.
- bengotow 7y ago
  I think FaceApp in particular strikes a chord in the United States because it's owned by a Russian Company. Name + faces (and therefore age and gender and race) + Location is the kind of data that enabled a lot of granular facebook ad targeting in 2016.
  - Raphmedia 7y ago
    As someone who is not an American citizen and does not live in the United-States, I get the same fears and issues from companies based in the US. I distrust the American and Russian governments and companies equally.
    - armandososa 7y ago
      As a Mexican, I honestly distrust Trump more than Putin.
      - kofejnik 7y ago
        and that is a serious mistake, I believe
  - umeshunni 7y ago
    > I think FaceApp in particular strikes a chord in the United States because it's owned by a Russian Company. So, it's purely Xenophobia then.
    - 7y ago
enterx 7y ago
TL; DR Russian company has the ability to identify the person. My guess: Probably using already existing KGB software in the backend.
sergiotapia 7y ago
>To make FaceApp actually work, you have to give it permissions to access your photos - ALL of them. But it also gains access to Siri and Search .... Oh, and it has access to refreshing in the background - so even when you are not using it, it is using you. This is false, you can just take a pic and never give it access to your gallery. If the authors are lying about something so trivial, what else do journalists lie about? That's why I don't trust them.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Is this true for both iOS and Android? It probably needs access to media to store images, and once you grant it that level of access, it can read media as well.
  - sergiotapia 7y ago
    I speak for Android. It asked me for camera access, but if I want to "oldify" my gallery pics, it asks for a different set of permissions (which I deny).
  - efrafa 7y ago
    It works on iOS without access to your photos. Parent is right.
adamnemecek 7y ago
When Fascism comes to America, it will be using the tears laughter emoji.
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d1ffuz0r 7y ago
Purely anti-Russian article
logfromblammo 7y ago
Interestingly, "look at all the photos on this device" is a permission that people may be uncomfortable granting to their closest friend. And yet, people will grant it to a complete stranger of a conscience-less corporation with nary a qualm.
stevehiehn 7y ago
Can't you just scrap LinkedIn or something and have your own name to face db?
- asdff 7y ago
  Sure can, doesn't make this app any less of an issue though.
Balgair 7y ago
Some commentors point out that though they never put their faces into the app, their family and friends did upload their faces without consent. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from just fishing through public DBs and uploading just about anything into the app. There are issues of consent, of what is 'personal' data, of who 'owns' that data, of public vs. private, etc. We've all been on this ride for a while now and it's not getting any more clear. If anything, it's getting more and more murky. Deepfakes are now able to be done on a laptop, essentially. EULAs are basically ghosts, the public cannot understand/see them but is terrorized by them at random. Privacy is meaningless despite it's proven requirement for proper adolescent/human development. I think we're in a time now where we need a new idea and a new way of doing things and thinking about our world, where a paradigm shift is required. Our ideas of personal data, of public data, of private data, of consent, and of ownership are no long going to work. The ethics aside, the old ways of doing things are not workable anymore. What does a flawed, yet workable, solution look like?
ceedan 7y ago
Apple/Google need to start surfacing information regarding an apps privacy policy. If there is this large of a discrepancy between an app's functionality and it's privacy policy - why should it even be allowed?
londons_explore 7y ago
I wonder if a neural network could be trained to recognise people who "look honest" or who "look like they'll repay their loans" (aka, profitable credit scoring data).
- slg 7y ago
  >I wonder if a neural network could be trained to recognise people... who "look like they'll repay their loans" And that is how you get bigoted algorithms. This will just select for older white men due to various socioeconomic reasons.
slg 7y ago
Can someone explain how a company can claim the uploader gave them a license to an image when they do nothing to check if the person uploading the image had ownership in the first place? I have seen plenty of examples of people using the FaceApp on famous people with some image that the uploader clearly doesn't own. Furthermore, don't people have rights over their likeness that overruled certain rights the copyright holder has over the image? For example, I would own the copyright if I met some celebrity on the street and took their photo. That doesn't mean I can freely use that image in my advertising.
magoghm 7y ago
"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." -- Scott McNealy 1999
sjg007 7y ago
This type of app should run on local hardware only. Apple and Google could enforce that.
llarsson 7y ago
This is entirely standard legalese language that ALL apps that handle data on your behalf will have in their ToS. It sounds broad and nefarious, and it most certainly CAN be used in such a way, but it is what they need to be granted, lest they get sued by someone for obvious things such as creating derivative works (i.e. the altered face), hosting the images somewhere, being able to make a profit at all off their business, and so on. Go look up other ToS for similar services, it is almost verbatim the same wording. My problem is that this is the "least amount" of permissions to realistically make a media centric app, because legally, there's nothing stopping them from abusing the hell out of these rights.
antirez 7y ago
LOL people keep posting their entire life on Instagram, and now FaceApp is the danger.
sysashi 7y ago
If you're comfortable posting pictures to instagram, twitter and other social means you have nothing to worry about :) On the other hand, personally I'm freaking out whenever my phone tries to upload photos to "cloud" without even asking or just a small prompt (which can be easily misclicked). So apps like that are out of the question!
martin1975 7y ago
One could now conceivably write an app that scours the internet for these faces on social media and inject propaganda designed to tilt an election outcome one way or another.... (e.g. perhaps by looking at which group an FB user follows, just one of many examples). It wouldn't be outright sabotage, but FaceApp certainly paves the way to greater influence by a foreign government over USA's or anyone's election process/campaign.
- soared 7y ago
  You could do that exact same thing without FaceApp data though.
  - martin1975 7y ago
    Very true. This just adds more fuel to the fire.
lechiffre10 7y ago
I find it incredibly ironic that it took me about 30 seconds to go to the author's profile, see him plaster all the social media platforms we can reach him on. Went to his Instagram and could tell where he lives, where's staying at when he travels, that he enjoys walks with his mom in Centennial beach in Delta, BC and what he does for hobbies. All this in under a minute and yet here we are panicking over a Russian Company that can do whatever it wants with your face pictures. Ok.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  > I've been a journalist, analyst, and corporate executive, and have chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. Thats because he needs to be able to be contacted to gain outsized benefits from society. Writing about this stuff "first" gets you tapped for corporate executive roles or lucrative expert witness roles in judicial proceedings. It is called "thought leadership" He is much more objective about doing this than malleable people fearing missing out
erichurkman 7y ago
What an utterly infuriating article to read: as you scroll down Forbes drops a giant floating video… on top of the text you're trying to read and it follows you as you scroll.
garysahota93 7y ago
Wow, that license agreement it brutal. What sucks is that because they have access to the whole photo library, even if I don't want my face on it, they can still get my face via my friends' (or parents') phones that have taken pictures of me in the past. Because we are all connected, it makes it really hard to not be sucked into this (even if you don't participate)
HiHelloBolke 7y ago
Data-rape
acd 7y ago
I think easy to understand end user license agreements should be enforced by law. A lawyer rewrites Instagrams terms of service to one page easy to read english. http://dontai.com/wp/2017/01/10/a-plain-speak-end-user-agreement-for-instagram/ http://dontai.com/wp/2017/01/10/a-plain-speak-end-user-agree... Here is a service that explains common terms of services for web sites. https://tosdr.org/ https://tosdr.org/
hello_asm_world 7y ago
So here is the irony. You can use the app without revealing your identity (no emails, facebook creds). However, if you want them to immediately delete your data ("most" data within 48 hours) you need to EMAIL them with a subject line "PRIVACY". So now I add an EMAIL to the Face. Perhaps I can send a mock email id but what about those that are not that aware but care about their privacy? They probably have now identified their photos, oh US needs laws, this is a bipartisan issue
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hkon 7y ago
In some months, "This is how faceapp actually influenced US elections..."
troycarlson 7y ago
The Facebook login flow requests permission to access your "photos". Does anybody know what that entails? Can they freely query your photos edge on the FB API?
treebeard901 7y ago
The permission api for photo access needs to be redesigned. In addition to all of the personal pictures we take, think about all of the screenshots we take of important stuff, like passwords, access codes or conversations.

355 points by ElectronShak 7y ago

Solid is a MIT project aiming to improve privacy and data ownership, founded with Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Perhaps this kind of initiatives and blockchain will remind people what valuable data they are sharing. Information Economy should directly incentivize those who share their identity, I couldnt imagine some stanger in the street asking me for all this information, and me giving it without a doubt. It is scary but it's normalized.

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break_the_bank 7y ago

It's worse when it has access to your picture because a friend thought it'd be funny. In that situation the App gets my picture without my consent.

hsbaut76 7y ago
Same
benjaminva 7y ago
Do friends need to enter the name along with the picture? How about the age? I haven't tested the app myself yet and probably will not.
kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
This is the reason I have just stopped bothering about privacy. I meticulously guard which apps I share my phonebook with, while other idiots share their entire contacts folder (including my details) en-masse to apps like TrueCaller. It just feels so futile to even care.
- penagwin 7y ago
  You're right, facebook and others can (and do!) infer people based on contact lists, even if you don't have a facebook account, if all your friends do then Facebook already knows who you are, who your friends are, you're likely interests (based off friends), etc. The best I figure I can do is to keep the apps I used locked down if possible - and to avoid "stupid" apps that clearly have little purpose other then dataharvesting. Cool Selfy app? Ehh pass.
thecatspaw 7y ago
Can a friend agree to these terms when it is my face, my name, and my private data though?
- jkaplowitz 7y ago
  In many countries including the US, yes. If the right mixture of you, the company, and your friend are located in or deal with Europe or similar places, possibly not, but it very much depends on the details.
- the_seraphim 7y ago
  Define private, you walk in public in front of security cameras wearing your face in public. your face is now public information. Your name is on your mail, your census, your driving licence, you provide your name and address to companies all the time. your name and address is now public information. If someone can tie your public face to your public name then thats public information. you dont like it, get a PO box and wear a mask all the time.
code_duck 7y ago
Didn't Facebook face tagging work the same for a long time? It would ask people to provide names for other people in their photos
- corobo 7y ago
  Still does, at least partially. Facebook's always asking me if I want to tag certain people in their images... No Facebook, am no a grass

alunchbox 7y ago

Hmm. Would it be possible to run these Apps in a VM like container? allow it access a dummy, empty folder to read from somewhat of a container for all apps? then there would be a manual transfer process between the shared folders after you've saved an image? So when downloading an App it will ask would you want to run this in an isolated environment? and you can, so if it tries to scan over your photo gallery it will have an empty folder etc..

penagwin 7y ago
This is a scoping issue. On iOS devices at least no app has access to your photo gallery unless they explicitly prompt you for permission. That said, many apps need access to the photo gallery - say I want to put a screenshot into discord. The issue is that now Discord has access to ALL of my photos. There needs to be more scoping options. "Allow access to previous 12 photos while you're using the app" kinda deal.
- ajconway 7y ago
  On iOS is't possible to ask the system to present a photo picker on behalf of the app without requiring a permission to look into your photos.
  - eswat 7y ago
    So I’ve heard about this feature before but I’m not sure it actually exists? From the Photos app you can only share specific photos with specific apps that add themselves to the popout menu. If you disable Photos access to any of these apps they will just ask that you re-enable full photo access.
    - jclardy 7y ago
      It does exist, I have an app that manipulates photos and if you reject photos permission you can still use the photo picker and get access to one photo of the user's choice. You can't directly save to the photos library, but you can save it via a system share sheet. Most apps don't make that obvious though, and imply that they need full photos access to work (Or they don't give options to use the system picker/system share sheet.)

Rannath 7y ago

Aren't contracts with unlimited time periods non-binding? I was under the impression that any contract that said perpetual anything could be trivially disregarded. Or is that a regional thing?

penagwin 7y ago
It's almost certainly depends on the juridiction but I am curious on this. Also if any lawyers read this - If "perpetual" isn't binding, would say "The next 200 years" be binding? It's an explicit time period but effectively still "indefinite" for the lifetime of an individual.
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  IANAL, but I've definitely heard of contracts between corporations being longer than the lifetime of an individual. Like UK leasehold properties [1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease
bhouston 7y ago
The language from their terms of service (https://faceapp.com/terms https://faceapp.com/terms) is this: > You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you. When you post or otherwise share User Content on or through our Services, you understand that your User Content and any associated information (such as your [username], location or profile photo) will be visible to the public. This is standard language that is generally enforceable. It is the license that is perpetual, not the contract.
- cmarschner 7y ago
  Not in Europe. I’m sure lawyers are excited.

bhouston 7y ago

It should be worth millions to have pictures of 150M faces and associate them with names. If I had that I would sell it to the people running the in-store camera networks that identify customers into demographic categories and offer them this so that they can associate real identities. Another data broker, now of people's faces. I am surprised that this isn't yet done by the free make-up apps or even by snap chat. I guess there are people crawling Facebook and probably other profile services like LinkedIn, etc. But probably crawling these is not legal to resell.

stunt 7y ago

The coverage on FaceApp and the way they talk about it is ridiculous. When it comes for instance to Snapchat's numbers, the coverage is about the success of the company. How is FaceApp different than all other apps and social networks that are storing all your photos with location and tags to your friends except that FaceApp is a Russian company? I'm not defending FaceApp. I don't use social networks either for the same reasons. But this double standards in media is ridiculous in my opinion.

hi5eyes 7y ago
the only real difference between snap and faceapp is the media gave faceapp the russian tie in so now they're using it as that combined with federal investigation titles [1] snap is a scarier but most people dont care since its so ingrained into their lives... for whatever reason I never understood.. but my friends used love it even while I warned them how stupid it was so use snap in the first place if you cared about privacy what happens to snap.inc/your data when the userbase drops off completely.. inevitably like every other social media.. 1. https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/17/faceapp-gets-federal-attention-as-sen-schumer-raises-alarm-on-data-use/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/17/faceapp-gets-federal-atten...
- marpstar 7y ago
  On top of that, FaceApp doesn't request Geolocation permissions while Snap integrates a map of friends in the app itself.
  - jmkni 7y ago
    The app doesn't request Geolocation data, but might the geographic info still be in the EXIF data in the photo that gets uploaded?
    - bengotow 7y ago
      Yep this is correct, location history can be scraped from the EXIF data in the photos in your camera roll.

mikeash 7y ago

We keep harping on about privacy, and then shit like this happens. There are two possible conclusions to draw. One is that the general public actually doesn’t care about privacy at all. It’s a niche concern. The other is that the general public cares but is completely and utterly clueless about how to defend themselves, to the point that an app can literally say “give us your name and face and we can do whatever we want with it in perpetuity throughout the universe” and people will happily oblige. I don’t know which one is correct but neither one is great.

the_seraphim 7y ago
Consider the stupidity of the average human. Then consider that half of the population is stupider than that
Voloskaya 7y ago
Option 3: No one read the terms of services, and 99% of the app users are not even aware of that, didn't even give it a passing thought.
- swsieber 7y ago
  This. Caught me by surprise but in retrospect, of course an app is going to slip this in.
- mikeash 7y ago
  That falls under the second option. Being capable of defending your privacy means understanding that you shouldn’t willingly give your personal info to random apps.
  - Voloskaya 7y ago
    They didn't 'willingly' give anything. Like any app, you launch it and you accept the EULA. Then it asks you for permission to use your camera and for your contacts: it makes sense you want to take selfies and share them. That's it, now all your data belong to them. There is no functional difference between an app that will siphon all your private data and an app that won't. for the vast majority of users, at no point did they stop and ponder whether they were ok giving up their 'face' for a filter app. The only way to know would be to read the terms, and even then if you are not a lawyer you won't see the traps (e.g. understanding that "User Content" actually refers to your face).

2_listerine_pls 7y ago

Facebook owns access to your face, body, name, friends, family, trips, events, conversations, location, groups, interests, political orientation, estimated IQ, payments, workplace, other sites you visit, etc... Yet, Forbes & others talk about FaceApp.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
> Yet, Forbes chooses to talk about FaceApp. https://www.forbes.com/search/?q=facebook https://www.forbes.com/search/?q=facebook
- 2_listerine_pls 7y ago
  Obviously meant that there are many other elephants in the room and but they decided to promote an alarming article about this new app that records your photos!!! Is it so difficult for You to understand?
  - asdff 7y ago
    You want every article they put out to be about all the elephants at once? Because they've already put out articles about all the other elephants and continue to do so. This one just joined the zoo is all.
    - 2_listerine_pls 7y ago
      What is so alarming about another App doing the same? Why are major newspapers writing these overblown articles at the same time?

deleted 7y ago

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imgabe 7y ago

Is "what your face looks like" private information? You publicly display your face everywhere you go all the time. It's not really practical to hide it. Likewise your name you pretty much freely give out to anyone who asks. Is that private information? So Faceapp knows "There's a person with this name who looks like this". Was that supposed to be a secret? I'm concerned about privacy too, but it seems like some people just want to hide under a rock for their entire lives. I don't know how anyone manages to leave the house if having people see your face and know your name is a serious concern.

daenz 7y ago
>Is "what your face looks like" private information? I think it's the linkage of the name and the face. Either of those things alone don't seem like private information, but together, I would argue they are private. I can't provide a good reason as to why I think that yet though.
- Whatarethese 7y ago
  They publicly said that less than 1% of the users created an account and tied it to a name. Granted thats still hundreds of thousands but it nothing crazy.
lolsal 7y ago
Would a face be considered private in countries/cultures where women cover their face most of the time, or particularly in public? This is an honest question, I really do not know what I think.
bagacrap 7y ago
Faceapp knows what 150M faces look like. That concentration of information is valuable. Google built a fortune by taking freely available information and organizing it for easy access. In the case of faceapp there are many nefarious actors who could serve as clients.
- stlark 7y ago

Raphmedia 7y ago

Every one I know is already using either Facebook Messenger (which has the same face scanning features) and/or Snapchat (which also has this feature). This is not new. I've been using FaceApp since its release. There are a lot of other similar apps that I've used in the past. Especially makeup simulator apps. BeautyPlus, YouCal, InstaBeauty, BeautyCam, Facetune, Photo Plastic, Visage Lab, etc.

bengotow 7y ago
I think FaceApp in particular strikes a chord in the United States because it's owned by a Russian Company. Name + faces (and therefore age and gender and race) + Location is the kind of data that enabled a lot of granular facebook ad targeting in 2016.
- Raphmedia 7y ago
  As someone who is not an American citizen and does not live in the United-States, I get the same fears and issues from companies based in the US. I distrust the American and Russian governments and companies equally.
  - armandososa 7y ago
    As a Mexican, I honestly distrust Trump more than Putin.
    - kofejnik 7y ago
      and that is a serious mistake, I believe
- umeshunni 7y ago
  > I think FaceApp in particular strikes a chord in the United States because it's owned by a Russian Company. So, it's purely Xenophobia then.
  - 7y ago

enterx 7y ago

TL; DR Russian company has the ability to identify the person. My guess: Probably using already existing KGB software in the backend.

sergiotapia 7y ago

>To make FaceApp actually work, you have to give it permissions to access your photos - ALL of them. But it also gains access to Siri and Search .... Oh, and it has access to refreshing in the background - so even when you are not using it, it is using you. This is false, you can just take a pic and never give it access to your gallery. If the authors are lying about something so trivial, what else do journalists lie about? That's why I don't trust them.

djsumdog 7y ago
Is this true for both iOS and Android? It probably needs access to media to store images, and once you grant it that level of access, it can read media as well.
- sergiotapia 7y ago
  I speak for Android. It asked me for camera access, but if I want to "oldify" my gallery pics, it asks for a different set of permissions (which I deny).
- efrafa 7y ago
  It works on iOS without access to your photos. Parent is right.

adamnemecek 7y ago

When Fascism comes to America, it will be using the tears laughter emoji.

deleted 7y ago

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d1ffuz0r 7y ago

Purely anti-Russian article

logfromblammo 7y ago

Interestingly, "look at all the photos on this device" is a permission that people may be uncomfortable granting to their closest friend. And yet, people will grant it to a complete stranger of a conscience-less corporation with nary a qualm.

stevehiehn 7y ago

Can't you just scrap LinkedIn or something and have your own name to face db?

asdff 7y ago
Sure can, doesn't make this app any less of an issue though.

Balgair 7y ago

Some commentors point out that though they never put their faces into the app, their family and friends did upload their faces without consent. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from just fishing through public DBs and uploading just about anything into the app. There are issues of consent, of what is 'personal' data, of who 'owns' that data, of public vs. private, etc. We've all been on this ride for a while now and it's not getting any more clear. If anything, it's getting more and more murky. Deepfakes are now able to be done on a laptop, essentially. EULAs are basically ghosts, the public cannot understand/see them but is terrorized by them at random. Privacy is meaningless despite it's proven requirement for proper adolescent/human development. I think we're in a time now where we need a new idea and a new way of doing things and thinking about our world, where a paradigm shift is required. Our ideas of personal data, of public data, of private data, of consent, and of ownership are no long going to work. The ethics aside, the old ways of doing things are not workable anymore. What does a flawed, yet workable, solution look like?

ceedan 7y ago

Apple/Google need to start surfacing information regarding an apps privacy policy. If there is this large of a discrepancy between an app's functionality and it's privacy policy - why should it even be allowed?

londons_explore 7y ago

I wonder if a neural network could be trained to recognise people who "look honest" or who "look like they'll repay their loans" (aka, profitable credit scoring data).

slg 7y ago
>I wonder if a neural network could be trained to recognise people... who "look like they'll repay their loans" And that is how you get bigoted algorithms. This will just select for older white men due to various socioeconomic reasons.

slg 7y ago

Can someone explain how a company can claim the uploader gave them a license to an image when they do nothing to check if the person uploading the image had ownership in the first place? I have seen plenty of examples of people using the FaceApp on famous people with some image that the uploader clearly doesn't own. Furthermore, don't people have rights over their likeness that overruled certain rights the copyright holder has over the image? For example, I would own the copyright if I met some celebrity on the street and took their photo. That doesn't mean I can freely use that image in my advertising.

magoghm 7y ago

"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." -- Scott McNealy 1999

sjg007 7y ago

This type of app should run on local hardware only. Apple and Google could enforce that.

llarsson 7y ago

This is entirely standard legalese language that ALL apps that handle data on your behalf will have in their ToS. It sounds broad and nefarious, and it most certainly CAN be used in such a way, but it is what they need to be granted, lest they get sued by someone for obvious things such as creating derivative works (i.e. the altered face), hosting the images somewhere, being able to make a profit at all off their business, and so on. Go look up other ToS for similar services, it is almost verbatim the same wording. My problem is that this is the "least amount" of permissions to realistically make a media centric app, because legally, there's nothing stopping them from abusing the hell out of these rights.

antirez 7y ago

LOL people keep posting their entire life on Instagram, and now FaceApp is the danger.

sysashi 7y ago

If you're comfortable posting pictures to instagram, twitter and other social means you have nothing to worry about :) On the other hand, personally I'm freaking out whenever my phone tries to upload photos to "cloud" without even asking or just a small prompt (which can be easily misclicked). So apps like that are out of the question!

martin1975 7y ago

One could now conceivably write an app that scours the internet for these faces on social media and inject propaganda designed to tilt an election outcome one way or another.... (e.g. perhaps by looking at which group an FB user follows, just one of many examples). It wouldn't be outright sabotage, but FaceApp certainly paves the way to greater influence by a foreign government over USA's or anyone's election process/campaign.

soared 7y ago
You could do that exact same thing without FaceApp data though.
- martin1975 7y ago
  Very true. This just adds more fuel to the fire.

lechiffre10 7y ago

I find it incredibly ironic that it took me about 30 seconds to go to the author's profile, see him plaster all the social media platforms we can reach him on. Went to his Instagram and could tell where he lives, where's staying at when he travels, that he enjoys walks with his mom in Centennial beach in Delta, BC and what he does for hobbies. All this in under a minute and yet here we are panicking over a Russian Company that can do whatever it wants with your face pictures. Ok.

rolltiide 7y ago
> I've been a journalist, analyst, and corporate executive, and have chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. Thats because he needs to be able to be contacted to gain outsized benefits from society. Writing about this stuff "first" gets you tapped for corporate executive roles or lucrative expert witness roles in judicial proceedings. It is called "thought leadership" He is much more objective about doing this than malleable people fearing missing out

erichurkman 7y ago

What an utterly infuriating article to read: as you scroll down Forbes drops a giant floating video… on top of the text you're trying to read and it follows you as you scroll.

garysahota93 7y ago

Wow, that license agreement it brutal. What sucks is that because they have access to the whole photo library, even if I don't want my face on it, they can still get my face via my friends' (or parents') phones that have taken pictures of me in the past. Because we are all connected, it makes it really hard to not be sucked into this (even if you don't participate)

HiHelloBolke 7y ago

Data-rape

acd 7y ago

I think easy to understand end user license agreements should be enforced by law. A lawyer rewrites Instagrams terms of service to one page easy to read english. http://dontai.com/wp/2017/01/10/a-plain-speak-end-user-agreement-for-instagram/ http://dontai.com/wp/2017/01/10/a-plain-speak-end-user-agree... Here is a service that explains common terms of services for web sites. https://tosdr.org/ https://tosdr.org/

hello_asm_world 7y ago

So here is the irony. You can use the app without revealing your identity (no emails, facebook creds). However, if you want them to immediately delete your data ("most" data within 48 hours) you need to EMAIL them with a subject line "PRIVACY". So now I add an EMAIL to the Face. Perhaps I can send a mock email id but what about those that are not that aware but care about their privacy? They probably have now identified their photos, oh US needs laws, this is a bipartisan issue

deleted 7y ago

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hkon 7y ago

In some months, "This is how faceapp actually influenced US elections..."

troycarlson 7y ago

The Facebook login flow requests permission to access your "photos". Does anybody know what that entails? Can they freely query your photos edge on the FB API?

treebeard901 7y ago

The permission api for photo access needs to be redesigned. In addition to all of the personal pictures we take, think about all of the screenshots we take of important stuff, like passwords, access codes or conversations.