FaceApp Has Responded To Concerns Over Privacy Violation
FaceApp, the app that is being used to flood your timeline with picture of your friends when they're "old" has many jabbing about privacy concerns.
After being around for two years, FaceApp has gone viral yet again, and just like the first time, privacy is a concern. According to multiple sources, the app was created in Russia, and may be violating your privacy when you agree to their terms.
That being said, FaceApp has now responded to your concerns. From Tech Crunch here's what they had to say:
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.
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 (for example, https://twitter.com/
joshuanozzi/status/ ). 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.1150961777548701696
Exactly what we'd expect a Russian data-mining company to say, right?