Remember when we wrote about everyone from your friends to celebrities posting “aged” photos of themselves on social media? Well, it now seems that the FaceApp owns the rights to 150 million users’ names and faces.
According to reports, more than a million users have downloaded the app from Google Play, and FaceApp is now the number-one app in the Apple Store’s “Photo and Video” apps section. Crazy isn’t it?
Twitter user James Whatley posted an excerpt from the terms and conditions of the app and it a bit creepy. “By using the app, people are giving FaceApp access to use, modify, adapt and publish any images of you that you offer up in exchange for its AI modification magic.”
Now it turns out that according to FaceApp’s terms and conditions: “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.”
TechCrunch reports that the app is able to access Photos on Apple’s iOS platform even if a user has set photo permissions to “never”. Another possible privacy violation the report flags is that the app uploads your photo to the cloud for processing, which means that it does not do on-device processing.
Which means your image is floating around the cloud up for the app to use anytime they please.
