FaceApp—the AI run viral photo mixing app has again been doing the circles in the news with controversial proofs showing it asks for access to Facebook’s friend circle of any random profile.
Russian made, this app allows you to mask your true age and send the user altered photos of how they will look if they were older or younger. It is a very popular ever since its onset in 2017. The app also contains options to log in using facebook and hence a breach can occur anytime which is suspected at present.
Indian cybersecurity special researcher Athul Jayaram alerted many portals raising a huge red flag. The app in legality must not use any information collected from social media without users’ intent. However, in this case, they took advantage of it going viral as many didn’t bother to read the terms well
FaceApp CEO Yaroslav Tried to Calm Things Down
After that, the CEO Yaroslav Goncharov informed that FaceApp earlier contained a feature called “Social Stylist,” that was put in place to invite the Facebook friends of any logged customer to vote for which style was best for them. However, he maintains that the feature is no longer at play but the app still collects data from the friend list section.
Moreover, this is a point of concern given the data breach which affected Facebook in the Cambridge Analytica scandal some years back. In other words, people should use Facebook well as it already has an option that allows users to explicitly choose what permissions they want to grant to a developer’s app and how much access is handed over.
Using the Toggle Off button the access to third party apps can be restricted. Yaroslav chipped in later saying that users can make a request to the company in order to delete all data from FaceApp’s servers. The steps to follow are to go to settings→Support→Report a bug’ with the word ‘Privacy’ in the subject line.
