After getting your old self, how secure is your photo on FaceApp?

Social media is going crazy with FaceApp. The mobile app, which uses neural network tech to automatically generate transformations of faces in photographs, is going viral with an ongoing trend of people making replicas of what they would (or probably will) look like in the far future.

This is the second popularity run of the app, where users select specific photos they want to put filters on, and these are then uploaded to the app’s servers to apply filters. The latest online challenge, known as #AgeChallenge, involves a lot of people and celebrities posting pictures of their future older, wrinklier, selves on social media platforms.

Most results are being posted on Twitter, some of which have been dramatic and most hiliarious. 

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However, there has been a rising concern on how secure it is to post your image for filtering. The FaceApp privacy page states it that they “may share User Content and your information with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that FaceApp is.”

Several reports have expressed concern on how FaceApp uploads users’ photos to the cloud without making it clear to them that processing is not going on locally on their device. It is also reported that the app overrides phone settings even when a user denies it access to the phones camera roll.

It all started with a tweet from a developer, who warned that the app could be taking all the photos from your phone and uploading them to its servers without any obvious permission from the user.

This would later be followed with several other reports and tweets on the same issue, with many proving just how insecure the entire #AgeChallenge is.

FaceApp responds to the privacy concerns

Following the spreading of awareness tips regarding the apps privacy, the company has released a statement on the matter as below.

We are receiving a lot of inquiries regarding our privacy policy and therefore, would like to provide a few points that explain the basics:

1. FaceApp performs most of the photo processing in the cloud. We only upload a photo selected by a user for editing. We never transfer any other images from the phone to the cloud.

2. 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.

3. 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. For the fastest processing, we recommend sending the requests from the FaceApp mobile app using “Settings->Support->Report a bug” with the word “privacy” in the subject line. We are working on the better UI for that.

4. All FaceApp features are available without logging in, and you can log in only from the settings screen. As a result, 99% of users don’t log in; therefore, we don’t have access to any data that could identify a person.

5. We don’t sell or share any user data with any third parties.

6. Even though the core R&D team is located in Russia, the user data is not transferred to Russia.

Additionally, we’d like to comment on one of the most common concerns: all pictures from the gallery are uploaded to our servers after a user grants access to the photos. We don’t do that. We upload only a photo selected for editing. You can quickly check this with any of network sniffing tools available on the internet.