Want To Take FaceApp Challenge? But It Can Steal Your Personal Photos!

Be it Bollywood celebrity or sportsman, everyone is going gaga over #faceappchallenge and are actively sharing their images on social platforms. This viral photo filter allows you to digitally age yourself by a few decades and shows your older version. But since the face-editing app went viral in the last few days, some online privacy experts have raised concerns over its terms and conditions. It is believed that this app could be accessing and storing users’ images without their permission.

The Russian app is one of the most famous and downloaded apps across the globe. This filter makes your face look a few decades older with wrinkles, sagging skin, and yellow teeth.

Desi bond. pic.twitter.com/iSjnQVuDA0

— Ayushmann Khurrana (@ayushmannk) July 17, 2019

Old age hit me like .. 👀 pic.twitter.com/8yHwIxTlyv

— Arjun Kapoor (@arjunk26) July 16, 2019

Nice #faceappchallenge #FaceApp
Team India player look after 25-30 years.😂😂😂 By the way #Chahal looking very cool👌👌😂 pic.twitter.com/yJbsYqzlfQ

— Aman Dev Manjhi (@amandevmanjhi) July 16, 2019

According to this app’s terms and conditions, it has the right to use, modify, adapt and publish any image of the user. "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," the Terms & Conditions state.

According to the New York Post, FaceApp can also use your name, username or any likeness provided in any media format without notifying and paying you. They can also reportedly keep and use that information as long as they want and you can’t do anything about it. Even those who set their Apple iOS photo permissions to "never" are not safe.

Re: FaceApp, can’t speak to it “uploading” photos but the app is definitely able to access my library even though I have Photos permission set to “never” 🤔 pic.twitter.com/jDMkqu5nML

— Karissa Bell (@karissabe) July 16, 2019

"All of this should raise alarms whenever a free service is acting on sensitive information like images – the revenue to pay for the service is coming from somewhere and it’s likely the sale of data related to what the service provides," said Tim Mackey, Principal Security Strategist at the Synopsys CyRC (Cybersecurity Research Center).

Moreover, this app can also see which website a user is visiting. Security expert Ariel Hochstadt told Daily Mail that hackers, agents of the Russian government, can see which website user is using and can track him. They can also secretly record someone if a person gives them camera access.

In a conversation with Mirror.co.uk, Matthew Panzarino, Editor-In-Chief at TechCrunch said, "Given how many screenshots people take of sensitive information like banking and whatnot, photo access is a bigger security risk than ever these days. With a scraper and optical character recognition tech you could automatically turn up a huge amount of info way beyond 'photos of people'."

To this, the FaceApp developers released a statement saying that the images are shared anonymously and they do not share any user data with third parties.

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Controversies In The Past

FaceApp has had its fair share of controversies in the past. Back in 2017, it had raised eyebrows for being racist. After the controversy, app developers apologized and removed the “hot” filter that was designed to lighten the skin tone.