What happens to the pictures we take on FaceApp? In the application’s privacy policy we find the answer to this and other security questions
All crazy about FaceApp, the app that can change the photo of your face showing you how you’ll look when you’re old. With surprisingly credible results, so much so that the use of this application has had a real boom in recent days.
FaceApp, in fact, is not new: it was born in January 2017 and had already fascinated many users in the past. But the new face aging filter is so realistic that millions of users have rushed to download the latest version. And someone, as it should be, started to ask some questions. For example, about privacy: what happens to the photos we upload to Faceapp? Are they stored? If so, where? But, above all, who is behind FaceApp? Some answers, very vague in fact, to these questions can be read in FaceApp’s privacy policy and terms of service.
What is FaceApp
The first question that needs to be answered is who is the company that develops FaceApp. On the Play Store and the App Store we can read that the name of the developer is FaceApp Inc. but in the terms of service it is clearly written that the developer is Wireless Lab OOO, a company based in Russia in St. Petersburg.
What data FaceApp collects
Of course FaceApp collects our photos, but not only that. The privacy policy states that “When you use our Service, our servers automatically record certain information in log files, including your IP address (“IP”), browser type, referring/exit pages and URLs, number of clicks and how they interact with links on the Service, domain names, landing pages, pages viewed, and other similar information. We may also collect similar information from emails sent to our users that help us track which emails are opened and which links are clicked on by the recipients. The information allows for more accurate reporting and improvement of the Service.”
What happens to our photos on FaceApp
Now to the more important questions: how are our photos processed by FaceApp? Are they also processed by other companies? Are they stored? The privacy policy also states that “We may share your User Content [your photos] and information (including, but not limited to, information from cookies, log files, device identifiers, location data, and usage data) with companies that are legally part of the same group of companies that FaceApp is part of, or that become part of that group (“Affiliates”). Affiliates may use this information to help provide, understand, and improve the Service (including analytics) and Affiliates’ own services (including providing better and more relevant experiences). But these Affiliates will honor the choices you make about who can see your photos.” This means, in a good summary, that FaceApp can give your photos to whoever it wants and without telling you. But it can also give them a lot of other information, including your geographic location. In other words, if you use FaceApp, you’re giving an unnamed “affiliate” of a Russian company not only a picture of your face and your home address, but also much of the information about your personal tastes that’s collected from your phone.
FaceApp and the photos in our gallery
As if that weren’t enough, there’s a second thing to remember: when you install FaceApp, you give it permission to access your gallery. This means that you’re authorizing FaceApp to take your personal photos, which probably contain other people’s faces and are sometimes even geolocated. You’re telling them where to go to find your friends, relatives, neighbors, your dog, and your cat. And you’re authorizing FaceApp to share all this information with its “affiliates.”
What FaceApp does with our photos
Everything said so far can be read in FaceApp’s official documents. To answer the question “what is FaceApp doing with all these photos” you have to enter the realm of assumptions. Once the conspiratorial hypotheses that speak of a large Russian archive that collects the faces of millions of people and then feeds them to the secret services are out of the way, hypotheses with a real economic sense remain in the field. The most probable is the one, fortunately, less worrying: FaceApp is collecting a huge database of face images to be used to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Wireless Lab OOO, according to this hypothesis, is hoarding photos of faces to then sell them to third-party companies (but this, in theory, is not covered by the privacy policy) that deal with AI or to develop in-house machine learning algorithms to resell to third-party companies (and this it can do without violating any policy).