FaceApp’s popularity has shot up once again in the past few weeks, thanks to the FaceApp Challenge.
According to Forbes, the app, despite being the next big thing on social media, apparently comes with a privacy concern.
#Warning: Every few years, the #FaceApp comes around.
— scott budman (@scottbudman) July 17, 2019
It’s fun.
It draws a lot of people in.
But, it also captures your face along with some of your private data.
It doesn’t tell us what it does with that data.
Be careful.
A security researcher, Baptiste Robert downloaded the app to clear the confusion & found out that FaceApp takes a copy of each submitted photo, which you had wanted to be transformed, back to the company servers.
Though if you are worried your data is being sent back to Russia, you must know that the servers are mostly based in America and not Russia, claims the same Forbes report.
Despite the assurance, FaceApp’s developer company is based in St. Petersburg, meaning that the faces will be viewed and transformed in Russia.
This can be done by mirroring the data from centers in the United States to data centers in Russia, but this possibility is still unconfirmed.
So to sum it up, Russian agencies could very well use your data considering it is lawful for them to do that.
Responding to the privacy controversy, FaceApp released a statement on the company’s behalf and told Forbes:
We only upload a photo selected by a user for editing. We never transfer any other images from the phone to the cloud.We might store an uploaded photo in the cloud. The main reason for that is performance and traffic: we want to make sure that the user doesn’t upload the photo repeatedly for every edit operation. Most images are deleted from our servers within 48 hours from the upload date.
Claiming that users can also request that all user data be deleted, he added:
We don’t sell or share any user data with any third parties.