Controversy Of FaceApp

Is it Safe to use FaceApp ??

This days FaceApp is in trend. Many famous  celebrities has already shared their photos from FaceApps which got viral in all social media. More than 80 millions of people all over the world are using this app. FaceApp is developed by Russian company Wireless Lab. This Application uses Artificial Intelligence (AI),machine learning and algorithms to give outcome as high realistic transformation of your recent photograph.The App can transform a face to make it smile,look younger,look older or change gender.

Have you used it ? I think you already did. Then have you checked out its terms and condition ? probably not. Many section of Terms and condition raise questions about how the app stores, process & share images of our faces as well as other data we generate. I would like to mention one section from the Terms & Condition of FaceApp :

"your grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, non exclusive, 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 know or later develop....without compensation to you." 

We think we're using the app for free but that isn't entirely true. In reality, we're paying the app by giving it our data.

what kind of data we are giving away ?

1. Images of our face 

2. Our personal information

As we can see in section FaceApp doesn't claim ownership over any of our images, but it claims that by using the apps, users grant perpetual,irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty free, worldwide, fully paid, transferable, sub-licensable license.

License? for what ?

To use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works, distribute, publicly perform, display your users content that is your photographs and any name or username without compensation to you. That's not all. The same section also claim that the App has the authority to use our images and personal data for any commercial purposes and that we acknowledge that this isn't going to cause us injury, that is injury to our privacy.

FaceApp founder and CEO, Yaroslav Goncharov said " 99% of users don't login therefore we don't have access to any data that could identify a person." 

So can they or can they not establish our identity and sell it to third parties ?

Of course they can.

 The privacy policy explicitly states that the FaceApp collects information from cookies, log files, device identifiers, location data and usage data.

and one more important  thing to note :

The App doesn't explicitly make clear to us - the users that our images uploaded and processed in its cloud server and on our devices.

In conclusion, FaceApp's terms and conditions are standard for most apps that we downloaded. For example, Snapchat has almost almost identical policies. 

Therefore, it's important to be careful about what permission we are giving to the Apps and actively Opt out of features that we don't want in the app setting. It is prudent to remember that free app like faceapp, facebook and even snapchat come at a cost and that cost therefore is often one's data privacy.