By Pascal Oparada
Social Media/Tech Reporter
If you have caught the viral FaceApp bug sweeping social media lately, then you are in good company. Celebrities like the Jonas Brothers, Drake, Dwane Wade and a host of other top celebrities have helped in the viral success of the app.
Launched in 2017 by Wireless Lab based in St. Petersburg, Russia, FaceApp uses Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence to almost accurately predict how you would look in your old age. Machine Learning is a new technique in computing.
The computer applies filters on photos to distort and figure out how you will look in old age by comparing them to thousands of photos of old people in its server.
Fear of data breach
At the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 in which the data of over 89 million Facebook users were sold to the data-mining firm, Cambridge Analytica, based in the U.K., the call for social media users to approach third-party apps with caution increased in America and parts of Europe. Facebook paid dearly for that breach of data both in stocks and fines by various countries affected by the illicit mining of personal data.
It forced the European Union (EU) to begin tighter regulation by introducing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Facebook, being the biggest culprit, was forced to amend its privacy rules several times and its founder, Mark Zukerberg, made to appear before Congress in the U.S. and Canada to answer for the company’s misuse of data.
Although tech analysts say there is nothing to worry about in using FaceApp, others have said the part that is troubling with FaceApp is its Terms and Conditions which leaves users with no option or simple way of data retrieval.
The company said users “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.”
What this means in simple language is that the company can do anything it wants with our selfies and photo galleries, even though it has said it works with only photos chosen and provided by users.
“What FaceApp collects is generic data. The same generic data that is taken by Facebook, Instagram and Google,” Chibuike Goodnews, Founder of Dochase ADX, a digital advertising platform, told TheNiche.
He said the only problem with FaceApp is that the company has not made it clear to users what data it is taking and for what purpose.
“They should make it easy for people to opt-out and revoke whatever licence they have given. That opt-out process should be by a simple click and not having to write an application letter to process it in order to have your data retrieved,” he said.
Are we in trouble?
Not really, but analysts have raised eyebrows about FaceApp’s country of origin. Wireless Lab, the company that developed FaceApp, is based in Russia and the apprehension is that it may turn over data collected to the Russian government as Cambridge Analytica did in 2015 and 2016 during the Nigerian and the U.S. elections.
“Most images are deleted from our servers within 48 hours from the upload date,” the company said in a statement provided to TechCrunch addressing the privacy concerns.
In 2018, the U.S. government asked WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, to turn in the data of its over 1.2 billion users. The company refused.
Users are hoping that FaceApp will refuse Vladimir Putin access to people’s data like Facebook and other social media companies did to the U.S. and other governments.
“As the viral success of FaceApp rages on, caution should be the word,” tech analyst, Iheme Andrew told TheNiche.”
