Democrats are trying to save face after the 2016 election hacking debacle.
The campaigns for candidates vying competing in the 2020 Democratic presidential contest received an alert Wednesday from the Democratic National Committee warning against the use of a Russian-made smartphone application with an old-age filter.
“This app allows users to perform different transformations on photos of people, such as aging the person in the picture. Unfortunately, this novelty is not without risk: FaceApp was developed by Russians,” said Bob Lord, the DNC’s chief security officer, according to CNN.
FaceApp came out in 2017, but it became a viral sensation this week due to the #FaceAppChallenge.
In response to privacy concerns, FaceApp put out a statement to TechCrunch, which said in part, “Even though the core R&D team is located in Russia, the user data is not transferred to Russia.”
The DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign were hacked during the 2016 election and published by WikiLeaks. A U.S. intelligence community report released in January 2017 found that Russian intelligence was involved the effort.
