A slap in your Face(App)

Is it the Cold War-era hangover, or does the Russian Government actually have access to our data? In an interesting twist to the viral FaceApp phenomenon, users and experts are now reading between the lines and expressing security concerns. While the app’s ‘Old’ filter has taken the world by storm, things are not helped by the fact that the app’s terms and services specify ‘perpetual’, ‘irrevocable’, ‘non-exclusive’, ‘royalty-free’, ‘worldwide’ license to use the photos we upload.

This is not the first time such data concerns have cropped up with an app that has managed to capture the world’s attention. Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica controversy saw the latter acquire the personal data of 50 million Facebook users. Late 2018 bloomer, China-based TikTok, similarly attracted controversy when the US Government fined the social-media app $5.7 million for illegally collecting children’s data.

Of course, once FaceApp’s terms and services were placed under scrutiny, it prompted the company to quickly issue a response. In a statement to TechCrunch, they said, “We never transfer any other images from the phone to the cloud…Most images are deleted from the server within 48 hours from the upload date”. It also stated that no user-data is “transferred to Russia” and “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”.

However, the security concerns with regard to the company’s commercial usage of people’s data continues to attract negative attention. Twitter user Portia Gumede echoes the sentiment expressed by many other tweets. She writes, “Did you just hear in the news? Installing the FaceApp makes you vulnerable to your phone being hacked. Uninstall immediately.”

Alternatively, for Karan Chhabra, Founder and CEO of cloud telephony firm Servetel, Facebook and the like also have similar access to data and, therefore, this shouldn’t be a matter of worry. “I don't see this as a big data breach, unless the data you're already sharing on different mobile apps is of big concern to you,” he says.

The company, has also updated to address these concerns. Now, whenever anyone is uploading a photo, a message pops up stating: Cloud Photo Processing: Each photo you select will be uploaded to our servers for imaging processing and face transformation,” before the user can opt to continue with the upload or cancel it altogether.