Washington: FaceApp, the viral age-defying photo programme, has raised fresh concerns in the US about facial recognition and data protection.
FaceApp’s developers are headquartered in St Petersburg, and the Democratic National Committee has warned presidential campaigns against using FaceApp because of its Russia roots.
FaceApp lets users upload photos of their faces and automatically edit them to look older.
Celebrities like Drake, LeBron James and the Jonas Brothers all posted edited snapshots on social media showing their greying hair and wrinkling skin, as did millions of other users across the country. Since it was launched in 2017, over 80 million people have edited their photos in the app.
But beyond its superficial entertainment, FaceApp drew questions about how it collects and stores users’ headshots. FaceApp uploads photos to the ‘cloud’ of servers run by Amazon and Google. And deleting the app doesn’t make much of a difference for how the data is used. The app’s terms of service say users grant the company a “perpetual, irrevocable ... [and] worldwide” licence to use a user’s photos, name or likeness.
Warning of national security and privacy risks for millions of Americans, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, urged the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the app. In a letter on Wednesday, Schumer called on the FBI to assess whether personal data uploaded into FaceApp “may be finding its way into the hands of the Russian government” or groups associated with Moscow. Schumer said that FaceApp’s origins “raise questions regarding how and when the company provides access to the data of US citizens to third parties, including foreign governments”.
“It would be deeply troubling if the sensitive personal information of US citizens was provided to a hostile foreign power actively engaged in cyber hostilities against the US.”
Schumer wrote that he was concerned both about the security of the data FaceApp aggregates and users’ awareness about who could it. Schumer warned that it isn’t clear how long FaceApp retains a user’s data or how users can make sure it is deleted.
In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, FaceApp chief executive Yaroslav Gonch-arov said FaceApp deletes ‘most’ of the photos from its servers after 48 hours. Goncharov described a complicated process for how people can request that their data be deleted from FaceApp’s servers and said that FaceApp is “planning to make some improvements” about posting the information to its website. Schumer also asked the FTC to consider whether there are sufficient safeguards in place to prevent Americans’ privacy from being compromised. If not, Schumer suggested that the public be alerted to the “risks”. “In the age of facial recognition technology as both a surveillance and security use, it is essential that users have the information they need to ensure their personal and biometric data remains secure, including from hostile nations,” Schumer wrote.
— Agencies
