Friday Social: FaceApp Data, InstaLikes, and Twitter’s New Look

FaceApp’s Data Furore

FaceApp. The power behind those aged selfies you’ve seen all over your social feeds again this week, after its first wave of popularity a few years ago. How much data are we giving away when we sign up? An increasing number of people have raised concerns this week over the app’s terms of service…

That Faceapp face-aging thing?

-Requires your Facebook login
-receives your name, profile picture, photos and email address via FB
-The company’s privacy policy ambiguously states how it can share data with its “Affiliates”
-The company is based in St. Petersburg, Russia 1/3

— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) July 17, 2019

And just like that, millions of ppl handed over pictures and data to a Russian app developer so they could see and share what they would look like when they are older 🤔 #FaceApp

— Ceylan Yeginsu (@CeylanWrites) July 16, 2019

While some have countered that FaceApp isn’t unique or unusual in what it requests access to –

I am not seeing much fishy in FaceApp

Photos are uploaded to FaceApp's servers on AWS w/ authorization. Not much info is being sent to FaceApp's servers other than user metrics (e.g. ui interactions)

I just wish there's an option for users to delete their photos from the server

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) July 17, 2019

everyone pointing out FaceApp’s personal data terms of service to try to prove they’re smarter than everybody else might want to check the ToS on pretty much every social media app they use

— lex croucher (@lexcroucher) July 17, 2019

In response to the questions, FaceApp has this week released a statement regarding its data use –

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 (for example, https://twitter.com/joshuanozzi/status/1150961777548701696).  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.