FaceApp Online Archives

FaceApp, the photo editing app with age filters that have made the app viral virtually overnight, seems to be now blocking users from India. The app is still available for to download for Android and iOS respectively from Google Play and Apple's App Store, but trying to use FaceApp from India now leads to error. The FaceApp block was reported by users on Twitter and confirmed independently by Gadgets 360. We've reached out to the company behind the app for a comment on the development, and will update this story as and when we hear from them.

If you are on Android and trying to use FaceApp from India, you might now be greeted with an error "Something went wrong, Please try again". iOS users are getting a more cryptic "ApiRequestError error 6 - Operation couldn't be completed" message. The problem was first reported by some Twitter users, and confirmed by Gadgets 360, as seen in the screenshots above.

FaceApp, which uses AI to apply various effects to your face, including the viral old-age filter, has been trending the last few days, catapulting the app to the top spot as the #1 free app in Apple's App Store, and the top three in Google Play at the time of filing this report. Everyone and their grandmother, it seems, has been posting their FaceApp-ed portrait to social media, not too dissimilar to the Prisma-craze from almost exactly three years ago.

Apart from the old-age filter, FaceApp can also “make you smile”, converting a regular photo into one where you are smiling. Similar to the old-age filter, another filter lets you look younger, while yet another FaceApp filter lets you change your style and experiment with different hair styles et al.

The app's rise in popularity has not been without its share of controversies, with some points in its terms of service raising concerns.

"You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform, and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you," one of the terms reads.

So, unless you are comfortable with FaceApp's terms as well as privacy policy, you might want to stay away from the app. It is, however, important to note here that FaceApp is hardly the first app to have terms and conditions like this as such language can often be found in other social media apps and websites. Still, it is good to keep in mind that user data is the biggest asset of an online service and it can be sold and transferred to generate revenue.

Meanwhile, FaceApp has caught the eye of US senators who are now asking FBI and FTC to investigate the app and its Russia links. 

This is notably not the first time when FaceApp has been embroiled in a controversy. Back in 2017, it had raised eyebrows for enabling users to change their ethnicity. After the controversy, FaceApp developers removed the controversial filter that was designed to change the skin tone and facial features of users to match a certain ethnicity.

In a separate issue in 2017, FaceApp was found to have a dedicated "hot" filter that looked to "lighten" the skin tone of users. The racist filter was removed after it sparked outrage among many users.

SAN FRANCISCO — Is a peek into the future worth your privacy in the present? That concern was pushed to the spotlight this week with the resurgence of a smartphone app that uses artificial intelligence to transform your current face into your younger and older selves.

People raised fears on Twitter and other social media sites that on iPhones, FaceApp would be able to see and upload all your photos, including screenshots with sensitive financial or health information or photos of kids with the names of their schools in the background.

That’s not actually true, but the scuttle serves as a good reminder to think twice before downloading new apps.

Even large, mainstream apps routinely collect user data. But many trendy-at-the-moment apps are guilty of mining user data as a primary purpose. Some personality quizzes on Facebook and similar services collect user information as a business, opening people up to breaches such as in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

As for FaceApp, the app grabs a photo only if you specifically select it to see your face change, security researcher and Guardian Firewall CEO Will Strafach said.

FaceApp is an app that can edit photos of people's faces to show younger or older versions of themselves.  The fashionable smartphone software used to simulate the effects of ageing on its users' features is at the centre of a global cybersecurity row with majors concerns expressed over its terms and conditions. 

Thousands of people are sharing the results of their own experiments with the app on social media. While such clauses are not dissimilar to those used by other social media firms, the company’s Russian background stoked fears it could be vulnerable to abuse. 

They argue that the company takes a cavalier approach to users' data - but FaceApp said in a statement most images were deleted from its servers within 48 hours of being uploaded. The company also said it only ever uploaded photos that users selected for editing and not additional images.

What is FaceApp?
FaceApp is not new. It first hit the headlines two years ago with its "ethnicity filters". These  transform faces of one ethnicity into another - a feature that sparked a backlash and was soon dropped. The app can, however, turn blank or grumpy expressions into smiling one and it can manipulate styles of make-up. This is done with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). An algorithm takes the input picture of your face and adjusts it based on other imagery.

So what's the problem?
Eyebrows were raised lately when app developer Joshua Nozzi tweeted that FaceApp was uploading troves of photos from people's smartphones without asking permission, however, a French cyber-security researcher who uses the pseudonym Elliot Alderson investigated Mr Nozzi's claims , finding that no such bulk uploading was going on - FaceApp was only taking the specific photos users decided to submit. FaceApp confirmed to BBC reporters that only the user-submitted photo is uploaded.

Other researchers have speculated that FaceApp may use data gathered from user photos to train facial recognition algorithms. This can be done even after the photos themselves are deleted because measurements of features on a person's face can be extracted and used for such purposes. Some question why FaceApp needs to upload photos at all when the app could in theory just process images locally on smartphones rather than send them to the cloud.

In FaceApp's case, the server that stores user photos is located in the US. FaceApp itself is a Russian company with offices in St Petersburg. From a business perspective, hiding the photo processing code in their server makes it hard for potential competitors from copying. It also makes piracy harder

Before using FaceApp for taking our photos of your own, its worth reading FaceApp's privacy policy which suggests some user data may be tracked for the purposes of targeting ads. The app also embeds Google Admob, which serves Google ads to users.

FaceApp's CEO, Yaroslav Goncharov told the BBC that  terms in FaceApp's privacy policy were generic and denies that the company shares any data for ad-targeting purposes, as the business model is to make money from paid subscriptions for premium features.

What else does FaceApp have to say?
Mr Goncharov shared a company statement that said FaceApp only uploads photos selected by users for editing. "We never transfer any other images," he said in a  statement.

"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."

The statement said that while FaceApp accepts requests from users to have their data deleted, the company's support team was currently "overloaded". FaceApp advises users to submit such requests through settings, support, "report a bug" and add "privacy" in the subject line. User data was not transferred to Russia, the statement added.

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) told BBC News it was aware of stories raising concerns about FaceApp and that it would be considering them.

"We would advise people signing up to any app to check what will happen to their personal information and not to provide any personal details until they are clear about how they will be used," a spokeswoman for the ICO said.

BBC:       Telegraph:        CNET:

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