FaceApp responds to privacy concerns



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Company News of Thursday, July 18, 2019

Source: Tech Crunch

2019-07-18

Ghana Attender, Defender Joseph Attamah Ghana's defender, Joseph Attamah, was amused with the application

FaceApp, the artificial intelligence-optimized self-editing application, which has had another viral moment, has now responded to a privacy controversy that we discussed earlier.

It is actually feared that FaceApp, a Russian startup, downloads photos of users on the cloud – without telling them that the treatment is not running on their device.

Another problem raised by FaceApp users was that the iOS app seemed to have a higher value on the settings if a user had refused access to his filmstrip, after people had reported that they could always select and upload a photo, ie even if the application did not have permission to access their photos. .

As we pointed out earlier, this last behavior is actually allowed in iOS – which gives users the power to block the application of any access to film, but to select the individual photos to download if they wish.

This is not a conspiracy, although Apple could probably suggest a better way to describe the authorization, as we had suggested previously.

Faced with the more general problem of facial data cloud processing, FaceApp confirms that most of the treatments needed to fuel the effects of beautification / bading / accentuation / age defense of its application are done in the cloud.

Although he claims that he only downloads photos that users have specifically selected for editing. Nor did the security tests reveal any evidence that the application is downloading the entire camera film from the user.

FaceApp then clarifies that it "can" store the photos that users have chosen to upload to the cloud for a short time, claiming that this is done for "performance and traffic" in order to ensure that a user does not send repeatedly. the same photo to make another montage.

"Most images are removed from our servers within 48 hours of the download date," he adds.

He also claims that no user data is "transferred to Russia" even though his research and development team is based in that country. It is therefore suggested that storage and cloud processing be carried out using infrastructure based outside of Russia. (We asked him to confirm where it was.) Update: The founder, Yaroslav Goncharov, told us that he was using AWS and Google Cloud.)

"We do not sell or share user data with third parties," he adds.

FaceApp also indicates that users can request that their data be deleted. Although this is not yet very simple, it asks users to send deletion requests via the mobile application by using "Settings-> Support-> Report a bug" with the word "confidentiality" in the object, adding that it "is working on a better user interface for this".

It also states that the vast majority of FaceApp users do not login – pointing out that it's impossible to link photos to identities in most cases.

Here is his statement in its entirety:

We receive many requests regarding our privacy policy and would like to provide some points explaining the basic principles:

1. FaceApp performs the essential of processing photos in the cloud. We only upload a photo selected by a user for editing. We never transfer other images from the phone to the cloud.

2. 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.

3. We accept requests from users for the deletion of all their data from our servers. Our support team is currently overloaded, but these requests are our priority. For faster processing, we recommend that you send requests from the FaceApp mobile app using "Settings-> Support-> Report bug" with the word "privacy" in the subject. We are working on the best user interface for this.

4. All features of FaceApp are available without login, and you can only login from the settings screen. As a result, 99% of users do not connect. As a result, we do not have access to any data that identifies a person.

5. We do not sell or share user data with third parties.

6. Although the main R & D team is located in Russia, user data is not transferred to Russia.

In addition, we would like to comment on one of the most common concerns: all photos from the gallery are uploaded to our servers after a user has authorized access to them (for example, https: / /twitter.com/joshuanozzi/status/ 1150961777548701696). We do not do that. We only upload a selected photo for editing. You can check it quickly with one of the network detection tools available on the internet.

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