In the latest filter to piss off a certain demographic, the xenophobia-tinged FaceApp filter has trended on Twitter because it gets you to 50-years+ in a few seconds flat.
I’m so sorry @ArianaGrande ??#AgeChallenge pic.twitter.com/P2A8mlW1ZM
— Carrie?24 (@CarrieG_1995) July 17, 2019
Naturally, after the ‘hot’ younger-self filter and the ‘smile’ filter, the #AgeChallenge went viral.
It also incited some heated discussions around its privacy policy and terms of service with the Russian photo-editing application being accused of uploading all of its users’ photos to the cloud. That’s right, those pics of your dog, those 20 selfies you took in the bathroom on your last night out, and that dick pic you just haven’t gotten around to deleting yet…
The Face-App’s terms of service for the old person filter are as follows:
“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 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.”
Not great. Not great at all.
Thankfully, US politicians are absolutely freaking out at the possibility of Russia storing the data of American citizens. New York Senator Chuck Schumer has sent a letter to the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission to look into FaceApp.
NEW: First to @NBCNews: @SenSchumer is asking the FBI and FTC to conduct a federal national security & privacy investigation into the Russia-based company, Face-App, which is producing all of those aged photos of your friends you’re seeing on social media.
Full letter is here: pic.twitter.com/9Q72yrj92c
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) July 17, 2019
In the letter, Schumer says: “I have serious concerns regarding both the protection of the data that is being aggregated, as well as whether users are aware of who may have access to it.
“[…] Russia remains a significant counterintelligence threat. I would urge that steps be immediately taken by the FBI to mitigate the risk presented by the aggregation of this data.”
However, FaceApp has provided a statement, first to TechCrunch, which says most images are deleted from the company’s servers within two days of the upload date.
“Most images are deleted from our servers within 48 hours from the upload date,” FaceApp said. “We accept requests from users for removing all their data from our servers. Our support team is currently overloaded, but these requests have our priority.”
It also added that despite its core team being located in Russia, “the user data is not transferred to Russia.”
Wouldn’t it be great if there was an option with FaceApp for users to delete their photos from the server? But that would be far too obvious wouldn’t it…
