If you have any form of social media, your feeds have been swarmed over the past couple of days with photos of your friends looking very old.
The recently repopularized FaceApp lets you age your face by dozens of years, in case you were ever curious what you’d look like as a septuagenarian. On the upside, the #faceappchallenge has given us some interesting photos of celebrities and some great memes.
When these actors grow old#FaceApp pic.twitter.com/HeyxoHah8i
— 9GAG (@9GAG) July 17, 2019
Literally me going through my timeline today #FaceApp pic.twitter.com/oJWYiQrTnx
— Saint Hoax (@SaintHoax) July 17, 2019
When you take a trip to the Year 3000. pic.twitter.com/O9Dxpwj6ex
— Jonas Brothers (@jonasbrothers) July 16, 2019
On the downside, it’s stealing a bunch of our information.
If you use #FaceApp you are giving them a license to use your photos, your name, your username, and your likeness for any purpose including commercial purposes (like on a billboard or internet ad) — see their Terms: https://t.co/e0sTgzowoN pic.twitter.com/XzYxRdXZ9q
— Elizabeth Potts Weinstein (@ElizabethPW) July 17, 2019
According to the app’s terms, you grant FaceApp pretty much free rein: It can take the photos you process through the app and use them however it wants. The terms of use read:
In other words, by using the app, you agree that its Russian developers can use your name and likeness however the heck they want without paying you. This may not be the best idea.
Forbes reporter Thomas Brewster writes that it could be worse: At least FaceApp is only hijacking the photos you tell it to, not all of the photos from your camera roll, as some had originally feared. Plus, the app sends photos to a server in America, not Russia. What a relief:
But just because Russians aren’t stealing your information for some state-sponsored machination, that doesn’t mean this is not still a privacy issue.
“Your face is now a form of copyright where you need to be really careful who you give permission to access your biometric data,” business technology expert Steve Sammartino told an Australian radio station. “If you start using that willy-nilly, in the future when we’re using our face to access things, like our money and credit cards, then what we’ve done is we’ve handed the keys to others.”
If you had the foresight never to download the app, consider resisting the temptation to turn yourself into a 70-year-old and keep your information to yourself. If you have already used the app, there is one silver lining: Life is short, and apparently, we’re all aging faster than we think.
