Is FaceApp being used to train facial recognition systems?

The app uses artificial intelligence through an algorithm that takes the input picture of your face.

(Web Desk) – FaceApp – the app that can edit photos of people’s faces to show younger or older versions of themselves – is being used by millions of people to share the results of their own experiments with the app on the social media.

The app uses artificial intelligence (AI) through an algorithm that takes the input picture of your face and adjusts it based on other imagery.

It is not new as it had first hit the headlines two years ago with its “ethnicity filters.”

These purported to transform faces of one ethnicity into another - a feature that sparked a backlash and was quickly dropped.

Viral app FaceApp has been giving people the power to change their facial expressions, looks, and now age for several years. But at the same time, people have been giving FaceApp the power to use their pictures — and names — for any purpose it wishes, for as long as it desires.

More than 100 million people have downloaded the app from Google Play. And FaceApp is now the top-ranked app on the iOS App Store in 121 countries, according to App Annie.

While according to FaceApp’s terms of service people still own their own "user content" (read: face), the company owns a never-ending and irrevocable royalty-free license to do anything they want with it ... in front of whoever they wish:

FaceApp terms of use: “You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you. When you post or otherwise share User Content on or through our Services, you understand that your User Content and any associated information (such as your [username], location or profile photo) will be visible to the public.”

PhoneArena’s Peter Kostadinov said: “You might end up on a billboard somewhere in Moscow, but your face will most likely end up training some AI facial-recognition algorithm.”

While we re all dragging FaceApp for taking our photos as their own, probably worth rereading Twitter s Terms of Service: pic.twitter.com/OJ0p9SLc4A

— Lance Ulanoff (@LanceUlanoff) July 17, 2019

I can see why FaceApp choose to upload user s photo to their server and process them in their server: From a business perspective, hiding the photo processing code in their server makes it hard for potential competitors from copying. It also makes piracy harder

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) July 17, 2019

I m sure faceapp is probably being used to train facial recognition systems, but, man, I am not gonna age well. pic.twitter.com/BieanijVXl

— Areeq Chowdhury (@AreeqChowdhury) July 17, 2019

But what we have learned in the past few years about viral Facebook apps is that the data they collect is not always used for the purposes that we might assume. And, that the data collected is not always stored securely, safely, privately.

Once something is uploaded to the cloud, you’ve lost control whether or not you’ve given away legal license to your content. That’s one reason why privacy-sensitive Apple is doing most of its AI work on-device.

And it’s a good reason to be wary when any app wants access and a license to your digital content and/or identity. As former Rackspace manager Rob La Gesse mentioned:

To make FaceApp actually work, you have to give it permissions to access your photos - ALL of them. But it also gains access to Siri and Search .... Oh, and it has access to refreshing in the background - so even when you are not using it, it is using you.