"Pirate" and "Yankees" governments worry about FaceApp | Chronic

The UK government said Thursday that it was reviewing the privacy concerns generated by FaceApp, the application that adds or takes years off faces and is all the rage soon after the United States heard that The FBI is investigating the case.

"We are aware of stories that raise concerns about FaceApp and we review them"said Thursday a spokesman for the office of the UK's Information Commissioner (the body responsible for the protection of privacy and personal data protection).

"We advise people to sign up in any application to check what will happen with their personal information and not to provide any personal information until they know how they are doing." will be used "he added in statements published by The Guardian.

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Although it's been around since 2017, FaceApp – available for Android and iPhone – has become viral in recent days in several countries and the ability to add filters to faces has allowed it to exceed 150 million downloads.

This viralization is accompanied by warnings from specialists, particularly because of the lack of knowledge about how the privacy of users is handled and about the actual use of the photos uploaded to it. # 39; s application.

The success of FaceApp lies in the fact that people are turning in droves towards "give him" to this platform, created by the Russian developer Yaroslav Goncharov, pictures of their faces, and they do it without knowing if these images are then deleted, sold, used to form facial recognition systems or to magnify databases of intelligence agencies.

READ MORE: They warn about the risks of FaceApp, the application that "makes you age"

After the start of this controversy, FaceApp last Wednesday released a statement banning access to any information other than the user-uploaded photo and guaranteeing that the software "performs the essential of photo processing in the cloud".

"We only upload a photo selected by a user to edit, we never transfer any other image of the phone to the cloud", maintained Goncharov.

"We could store a photo loaded in the cloud.The main reason is the performance and the traffic: we want to make sure that the user does not load the photo repeatedly for each editing operation, most of the images being removed from our servers 48 hours after the loading date "he badured.

The explanations did not prevent international politics from entering into the thick of things, in a context of distrust of the United States towards Russia after accusations of Kremlin interference in the United States. presidential election that brought Donald Trum in 2016 to the White House.

The US Senator Chuck Schhumer, leader of the Democratic Caucus, has asked the Federal Trade Commission and the FBI to get involved in a security and privacy investigation in FaceApp.

The application requires "full and irrevocable access to photos and personal data" who could present "Risks to national security and the privacy of millions of US citizens"said the legislator.

For its part, the National Democratic Committee has asked the party's presidential candidates to campaign to immediately eliminate the candidacy, underlining its Russian origin, the Washington Post reported.