Faceapp challenge could mean your photos are in the hands of the Russians
Jul 17, 2019, 1:34 PM | Updated: Dec 30, 2022, 11:27 am
Faceapp uses AI to project how a person will look decades in the future.
SALT LAKE CITY – Thousands of Utahns are taking part in the Faceapp challenge, posting photos of themselves on social media looking like old people. But cyber security experts say those pictures could end up on a billboard on the other side of the world–and there’s not much you can do about it.
The Russian company’s servers are based in the United States, but their photo processing is located in Russia. This means it would be difficult for federal regulators to shut down the company if they violate the terms of service.
But Dan Garfield with Codefresh in Salt Lake City believes the terms of service are written in a way that the company can do almost anything they want with the photos.
And there are other privacy concerns.
“Even when you grant an application certain privileges, or deny privileges, that doesn’t mean that the application you’ve installed on your phone can’t get more information about you. And it’s very common [that free] applications, it’s happened many times, get information that they weren’t supposed to get,” Garfield says.
Garfield recommends using Faceapp over a web browser to cut down on hackers’s ability to steal your personal information.
KSL NewsRadio’s Jeff Caplan has more on the issue of privacy, Russia, and the Faceapp challenge.
