FaceApp’s popularity has shot up once again in the past few weeks, thanks to the FaceApp Challenge. 


Are you in the “let me check how I look 50 year later” bandwagon? Someone who casually transformed a few selfies? If yes, beware! 

Huffington Post

According to Forbes, the app, despite being the next big thing on social media, apparently comes with a privacy concern.  


tweet warning people about this app invading their privacy triggered panic, further springing more investigators to study the app’s development.

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. 

Fox Business

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. 

Crestchicusa.com

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. 

Tennessean

So to sum it up, Russian agencies could very well use your data considering it is lawful for them to do that. 


But to acquire information from data centers in the United States is next to impossible for someone outside the country. 

Wall Street Journal

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.