There is much interest among the young and old to see how they will look decades from now. After Snapchat and TikTok there is now a newfound interest in seeing how looks change over time with age, courtesy FaceApp. Needless to say, each celebrity, leader and tycoon has tried their luck at playing around with FaceApp, a viral sensation taking the world by storm.
While the craze has reached fever pitch, there is a mixed bag of reviews on how it is good, bad or doesn’t make a difference. Every coin has two sides and FaceApp is no different. The app gives immense pleasure to people, but on the other hand, it also plays with people’s privacy. While the app has paid features like smiles, glasses, facial hair, and swapping genders; the fears of exposing yourself on the cloud is a bigger danger that the world is talking of. There, however, are even those who would love to rubbish this charge.
The app grabbed limelight in India when celebrities like Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh, Sonam Kapoor, Alia Bhatt and many others started posting their old-age pictures on social media and soon followed memes, which turned viral, especially the one on Anil Kapoor.
A mobile application designed by Russian organization Wireless Lab, FaceApp in its terms and conditions states, “You grant FaceApp a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, publish, translate, produce, distribute, while not compensating to you.”
As a writer, Arijit had been assigned a piece on FaceApp. He had to first test the apps features after which he wrote a piece that was featured in a weekly magazine. He said, “When I was assigned the task of writing a piece on FaceApp, I thought it would be proper to first check features and proceed further. I downloaded FaceApp to enjoy the idea of looking old in decades from now. While it’s fun, only ageing might look fine. Any attempt to look younger does not seem to work. My study tells me that there are two safety factors critical. One, you are giving direct access to your pics on the cloud. Secondly, anything that is remotely associated with Russia and China have been a bone of contention in recent years, given its surveillance policies much reported in media and beyond. This app after Tiktok and Snapchat is being mooted globally.”
The chatter about FaceApp’s dangers got fuelled further when a Twitter user Joshua Nozzi, an app developer, tweeted that FaceApp could be taking all the photos from one’s phone and uploading them to its servers without any obvious permission from the user. Later, he added that he was merely trying to warn users about a probable consequence.
Even as celebrities and corporate honchos get a feel of the app, it’s essential to think about the effect that such apps are having on individuals. Apps like this get popular and within an hour they become a trend but people forget that every coin has two sides. You often tend to expose your critical information to the world.
FaceApp has been quite a rage since 2017 when the app first went viral. Ever since it has amassed as many as 80 million active users, thanks to the very popular FaceApp Challenge where an old age filter has been the staple time pass of many a person. The app uses artificial intelligence couple with a syncing of neural networks to change one’s look.
A French cyber expert Baptiste Robert cleared FaceApp only took submitted photos those transformed. This when FaceApp has clarified it is not a privacy risk. Most images reportedly are removed from a server in 48 hours from the date of upload. Meanwhile, a commentary on FaceApp in foreign media suggests that the story about Russian leaks are a pack of lies.
There were similar fears raised when the 10 Year Challenge was trending among people on Facebook in January this year.
FaceApp’s troubles started when they introduced an ethnicity filter. The filter allowed people to change photos to look like a person from another country or race. They apologized and shelved it. Interestingly the company’s CEO, Yaroslav Goncharov, is an ex-executive at Yandex, widely known as ‘Russia’s Google.’ The app has been downloaded over 100 million times and is quite popular among celebrities.
One can download the app from AppStore or Google Play. Currently the app has 21 ‘fun and free’ filters in the basic version. The pro version on the other hand includes 28 filters. Experts write online – the biggest challenge will be how best to obtain and leverage personal information properly – keeping in mind awareness, consent, and protections.