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Experts have warned that giving the popular app Faceapp access to your camera could be giving away your biometric data.
Odds are that if you don’t already have Faceapp then somebody is shoved their phone in your face and given you an unpleasant experience of how you’ll look in 2070. While this may seem like an unending source of fun, legal experts have advised against downloading the app.
I remember seeing a post on Twitter a while back giving a vague warning about how Faceapp is run by a company called Wireless Labs which is based in Russia and that they can use your photos as they please. I didn’t think much of it and kept on scrolling, mostly because I don’t have Faceapp. Now I’m definitely not getting it.
I didn’t realise the implications of this until I read an interview conducted by journalist Ben Fordham with business technology expert Steve Sammartino:
“Your face is now a form of copyright where you need to be really careful who you give permission to access your biometric data. 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.”
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Upon reading this I did a bit more research on Faceapp and came across this article from tellerreport.com. It states that:
“FaceApp collects and saves all photos that users take. In addition, data that identifies your phone is also stored, along with cookies, log files, your location and your app use...All your data is shared with “companies in a group that FaceApp is part of, or companies that can later join this group”…Because other parties can freely join this group, in theory every company has access to the data. This allows an external party to also buy your data. FaceApp does not disclose which institutions have been allowed to look at the data so far.”
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Pretty scary stuff, huh? I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist but I also don’t want to hand over all my data to a company that, because it’s based in Russia, isn’t affected by European privacy laws.
If you want to read more about what Russian companies are doing on social media, look no further.
