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The Office of the Information Commissioner is examining allegations that FaceApp, the aging photo application becoming viral, is misusing personal data.
"We are aware of stories raising concerns about FaceApp and we will study them," said a spokesman for the information watch group on Thursday. "We advise people who register in an application to check the fate of their personal information and not to provide personal data until they know how they will be used."
The application, which can run on iPhone and Android devices, allows users to place an AI-powered aging filter on images downloaded from their faces.
The tool went viral this week with the #faceappchallenge hashtag, but as people pointed out that the developer's company is based in Russia, a series of stories about data collection potential has emerged.
FaceApp has subsequently refused to store users' photo libraries without their permission, which has been mentioned by various data development and data security experts. FaceApp CEO Yaroslav Goncharov said he did not sell or share user data with third parties.
"FaceApp performs the essential of processing the photo in the cloud," Goncharov said. "We only upload a selected photo by a user to edit it. We never transfer other images from the phone to the cloud.
"We could store a downloaded photo in the cloud. The main reason is the performance and the traffic: we want to make sure that the user does not download the photo several times for each editing operation. Most images are removed from our servers within 48 hours of the download date. "
Goncharov said the company had accepted user requests to remove all their data from its servers.
An American senator, Chuck Schumer, has called on the FBI to investigate FaceApp for its fears about "risks to national security and privacy."
"Given the growing popularity of FaceApp and these concerns about national security and privacy, I ask the FBI to determine whether personal data uploaded by millions of Americans on FaceApp could end up in the hands of Russian government, or entities with links to the Russian government. "
FaceApp claims that only its research and development team is located in Russia and that user data is not transferred to the country.
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