Is FaceApp Safe to use?

All those pictures on your timeline showing your friends looking 20 or 30 years older were created with the FaceApp download. But questions have arisen about its safety and what it can do with your photos and information.

Photo from the main page for FaceApp.com/app

FaceApp was developed by a Russian in 2017 and has been the most downloaded app in recent days. Driving those downloads is the aging feature in the app that has been used by celebrities and pretty much everyone you know.

But questions have arisen over its safety due to the terms of service related to the app and that the app originated in Russia. Russia has had many high-profile online misinformation campaigns and they also have a loosely-phrased privacy policy.

On Wednesday, Senator Chuck Schumer sent a letter to the FBI and the FTC questioning the safety of FaceApp. “According to its privacy policy, users grant FaceApp license to use or publish content shared with the application, including their username or even their real name without notifying them or compensating them” stated Schumer in his letter.

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FaceApp CEO, Yaroslav Goncharov, said to the Guardian that “…only a single picture specifically chosen by the user would be uploaded from a phone and the app did not harvest a user’s entire photo library,” a claim backed by security researchers.

He went on to say to the Guardian that the data was never transferred to Russia and was instead stored on U.S.-controlled cloud computing services provided by Amazon and Google. “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.”

For now, you will have to decide if you want it on your phone.

Link to the Guardian article:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/17/faceapp-denies-storing-users-photographs-without-permission