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posted by chromas on Friday July 19 2019, @06:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the You-should-be-in-pictures!-Oh...wait. dept.

Viral App FaceApp Now Owns Access to more than 150 Million People's Faces and Names:

Everyone's seen them: friends posting pictures of themselves now, and years in the future.

Viral app FaceApp has been giving people the power to change their facial expressions, looks, and now age for several years. But at the same time, people have been giving FaceApp the power to use their pictures — and names — for any purpose it wishes, for as long as it desires.

[...] While according to FaceApp's terms of service people still own their own "user content" (read: face), the company owns a never-ending and irrevocable royalty-free license to do anything they want with it ... in front of whoever they wish:

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.

FaceApp terms of use

[...] And it's a good reason to be wary when any app wants access and a license to your digital content and/or identity.

As former Rackspace manager Rob La Gesse mentioned today:

To make FaceApp actually work, you have to give it permissions to access your photos - ALL of them. But it also gains access to Siri and Search .... Oh, and it has access to refreshing in the background - so even when you are not using it, it is using you.

Do recall we recently had a story here about "Deep Fakes": Deep Fakes Advance to Only Needing a Single Two Dimensional Photograph.

Also at Security Week.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Friday July 19 2019, @07:47AM (3 children)

    by gtomorrow (2230) on Friday July 19 2019, @07:47AM (#868877)

    I would have thought it was because Company X now has a database of circa 150 MILLION FACES, regardless of the flag-waving. But what do I know?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @09:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @09:14AM (#868891)

    You miss the point. The "outrage" in the western media does seem disproportionate.

    For example compare the number of articles for this:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo [theguardian.com]

    vs just the number of articles playing up the russia faceapp privacy issues.

    Yes "only" more than 1.8 million yahoo accounts were affected. But "demographics" of images you get from such webcam sessions are quite different from the images from faceapp. e.g. there'll be fewer sexually explicit or high blackmail potential images going to faceapp.

    I've already told friends that their photos go to Russia etc and so far _all_ of them went "So what?". But I'm pretty sure fewer of them would go "so what" if their webcam/messaging videos were being leaked.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @03:29PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @03:29PM (#869009)

    150 MILLION FACES

    Facefuck probably had more than that and the MSM was fine with it until they "took $50k of Russian ad money and caused Trump to get elected".

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @12:08AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @12:08AM (#869231)

      Almost no one I know voted FOR Trump. They were trying to vote against Hillary!