Editorial Staff
Download FaceApp for iPhone and Android today! The app was developed as a self-editing program, but for that simple task, it appears to be demanding complete access to the user’s data and all personal photos, which is irrevocable at any time.
It looks like FaceApp is once against in a negative viral wave as US Senator Chuck Schumer takes notice. He has asked both the FTC as well as the FBI to investigate the company, which is based in Russia, due to the type of access the app asks for before uploading the user’s photo.
The first round of negative attention the Russian app received was for allowing filters to be used that changed the ethnicity of the user’s photo. Considered a way of bringing back the “blackface”, This filter, after much negative publicity, was pulled.
FaceApp Scandal Heating Up
Now, the app once again finds itself in the midst of yet another controversy. The newest filter,… one that ages the face of any uploaded photo, seems to require access that users are not readily informed of. A user thinks they are editing their selfie on their local device. What is actually happening, is that their photos and information are being uploaded to the cloud where they have unlimited access to them.
Schumer wrote a letter in which he stated concerns about national security, the privacy of US citizen, and more. He wonders that the company might allow that information to fall into the hands of third parties that may or may not include foreign governments.
The senator now wants to get to the bottom of the whole thing. He wants to know, via FBI investigation, whether this crucial information is actually being taken in by the authorities in Russia. He is also asking that all military and government personnel be banned, if possible, from using the app. This appeal has to go through the FTC, which is the entity to whom he made the plea.
Reuters has done a little digging of their own and found that no other images from the user’s gallery are uploaded and that most of the images in the server are purged inside of 48 hours. The company has also been said to relate information that no user data is ever actually transferred to Russia at all. The cloud in which the information is stored is Google and Amazon based web services.
FaceApp has also stated that it has very little user data on file, as almost every user that uses it never even logs into the system.