FaceApp Devs Have Rights to Use All 150 Million of Users’ Photos As They Please

Everyone’s posting their old age pictures as if they have time-traveled to see how they will look in the future. The viral application, FaceApp, has been the talk of the town yet again as celebrities from across the globe have started posting their edited photos.

While the app comes with plenty of cool features, it comes with a notorious drawback: your privacy at risk. According to Forbes, the app already has access to over 150 million faces and usernames and by using it, you give permission to use your photos and usernames for any purpose anytime whenever they want.

The app is owned by a Russian company, Wireless Labs.

FaceApp’s terms of service read:

You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you. When you post or otherwise share User Content on or through our Services, you understand that your User Content and any associated information (such as your [username], location or profile photo) will be visible to the public.

The app has already crossed 100 million downloads and the numbers are increasing by the day.

A large number of people have raised their concerns regarding the privacy of data. There have been a number of questions popping up on social media, the most common of which is whether the app uploads all of the photos in the gallery to cloud.

FaceApp team has issued a statement, clarifying a number of questions and it does not look that bad as it is being portrayed by a number of tech blogs around the globe.

Here are some excerpts from FaceApp’s statement:

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. 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.

Have you used FaceApp? Let us know what are your thoughts on the matter.

Sources: TechCrunch and Forbes