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For the past few days, you must be watching the new social media sensation “FaceApp”. From celebrities to politicians and even common social media users are using this new AI face editor, which originally went viral in 2017, but made a new comeback. According to Forbes, presently there are more 100,000 million downloads of FaceApp. Although like all other viral apps, this too will end up vanishing in a few days, there has been much news of this app already making damage. 

According to experts, by downloading this app, users are granting full access to their photos they have uploaded. The company can use this app for its benefit like training their AI facial recognition algorithm.

What is FaceApp?

FaceApp is relatively an Android and iOS mobile app that was originally introduced in 2017. Falling under the category of Photo & Video, the app currently the social media sensation. 

However, the app also came under the fire for ‘ethnicity filters’ changing the skin tone of the user. This is where controversy broke out and the company had to pull out the filters from the app. 

The app having image recognition utilizes Deep Learning technology recognizing the key features of the human face. By using Deep Learning, image recognition takes sample data through deep neural networks for learning the nuances of the human face.

How bad is FaceApp for Privacy?

Lately, digital experts are warning the negative effect of this app, where they are warning users of giving FaceApp access to photos. Here is how the app is bad for your privacy-

• You take an image, and the app starts processing
• It gets processed on FaceApp server at St. Petersburg
• You then get an image made by AI
• The photo then is saved on the FaceApp servers

According to Peter Kostadinov from Phone Arena, this is the most dangerous thing and big data hack. “Some faces might end up on a commercial somewhere in Moscow because the AI is reading each and every expression off your face,” he said.

Although FaceApp CEO, Yaroslav Goncharov has denied the data access allegations. According to him, only a single picture specifically chosen by the user would be uploaded from a phone and the app did not harvest a user’s entire photo library. Security researcher backed this claim. He further said, “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.”

Not on our Control

Since we are in social platforms, we are anyways providing access to platform owners to our details. The best example is Facebook who is harvesting the data, which can be used in various ways. This data isn’t stored safely, privately and securely. Once you upload anything on the social platform, you are secretly giving license to companies without reading the terms and conditions. 

If you don’t want to get into this and planning to install FaceApp, then think twice. FaceApp can be dangerous in many ways and you are solely responsible for it.