Senator Expresses Privacy Concerns, Wants FaceApp To Be Probed

FaceApp, an AI face editor app, has gone viral once again. You may not have heard about it but if you’ve been on social media at any point in the past few days, you might have seen selfies of people aged decades into the future. The app has gone viral again because of the filter which lets AI estimate how they might look like years down the line. New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer has expressed some privacy concerns and now wants the app to be probed.

Many have already expressed privacy concerns related to the app. Its Terms of Service mention that FaceApp will get a “perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license” from users who use its service.

So that right is being transferred to FaceApp in respect of the images of their faces that people are uploading. The fact that this app is made by a Russian startup doesn’t help assuage privacy concerns.

Senator Schumer has called on the FBI and the FTC to launch an investigation into the app after it was discovered that the app uploads users’ photos to the cloud. It had also not made it abundantly clear that the AI processing is not being done on users’ devices.

Senator Schumer says that this app could pose “national security and privacy risks for millions of US citizens” and that its “location in Russia raises questions regarding how and when the company provides access to the data of US citizens to third parties, including potentially foreign governments.”

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: FaceApp