What’s Up With Faceapp?

FaceApp is a mobile application for iOS and Android developed by Russian company Wireless Lab which uses artificial intelligence to generate highly realistic transformations of faces in photographs. The app can transform a face to make it smile, look younger, look older, or change gender (source: Wikipedia).

Faceapp has become very popular on social media because of its cool filters. Everyone, even celebrities, went gaga over this app. How it works is, you simply have to download the app for free. It is available for download to both Android and iOS users. It’s pretty straightforward and not complicated at all. You can either take a selfie or upload a picture from your mobile phone and voila! You can start playing with different filters already, simple as that. Everyone seems to enjoy Faceapp until recently, privacy issues started surfacing the Internet. 

According to news, Faceapp might have unauthorized access to users personal camera roll or that photos were being stored in the cloud and then transferred to Russian servers, where they could be accessed by Russian state security agencies. People on the Internet began to panic that Russians might be able to share any user data they wanted. Another issue raised by FaceApp users was that the iOS app appears to be overriding settings if a user had denied access to their camera roll, after people reported they could still select and upload a photo even if, for instance, the app not having permission to access their photos.

FaceApp added that they “might” store the photo users have chosen to upload in the cloud for a short period, claiming this is done for “performance and traffic” — such as to make sure that a user doesn’t repeatedly upload the same photo to carry out another edit. Furthermore, Faceapp mentioned that “most images” are deleted from their servers within 48 hours from the upload date. It also claims no user data is “transferred to Russia”, even though its R&D team is based there. According to Faceapp founder Yaroslav Goncharov that: “We don’t sell or share any user data with any third parties.”

So how do users delete their data? If you are worried and would like to completely get rid of all your photos on FaceApp, the only way to do it is by sending delete requests via the mobile app using “Settings-Support-Report a bug” with the word “privacy” in the subject line. 

Just recently, Faceapp releases a statement for its users’ peace of mind. Here it is in full:

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.