FaceApp

You can’t have helped but see the FaceApp images appearing on people’s social media, photos edited by AI to make them look older, younger or to swap genders.

You’ve probably also heard that the app is stealing your data in the background and uploading it to Russian servers.

We take a look at the app and dig into what it’s actually doing with your data.

The App

The app is available as a free download, with limited functionality, and a pro version with more filters to use.

FaceApp uses AI to manipulate images, making the subject look older, younger, add a smile and so on.

Why does Russia want my data?

A tweet from an app developer suggested that FaceApp was uploading massive quantities of photos from users phones without their permission, this was later quoted in an article on 9TO5Mac and other publications, unfortunately they didn’t actually check if the facts were true.

So just to help clear things up, the app is NOT stealing your data, well not in any way that Apple and Google are already doing.

What is the app doing?

The app will upload images to their servers, but only the ones you send for the AI to edit. No background uploading takes place, and only the individual photos you select are sent.

Using cloud servers to process the images will help keep the app size down, increase the speed of the image AI processing and helps keep their AI technology away from prying eyes.

The servers your photos are sent to appear to be based in America, although the company that makes FaceApp is based in Russia. This is not uncommon, as server costs and reliability in America are likely to be better than Russian based server.

The company states that most photos are removed from their servers after 48 hours. Like many other companies, they have a term that states any images sent to their servers may be used by them, royalty-free. Some may find it worrying that their photos might be used to promote this app, but this is not an unusual term in such situations. Twitter has similar terms in their usage T&C’s for example.

It’s likely that the images you send for processing are being used to help improve the AI technology used. Some have suggested this could be used to improve facial recognition algorithms, but In a statement to the BBC the firm’s chief executive, Yaroslav Goncharov, said “No, we don’t use photos for facial recognition training, Only for editing pictures.”

A French security researcher looked into what the app did when you used it, the technical details can be read in his twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/fs0c131y/status/1151270788357603328

How accurate are the FaceApp results?

There’s an article on the BBC News website where they test the app using some well known celebrities, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Morgan Freeman and Sir Ian McKellen – you can judge for yourself the quality of the results.