Everything You Need to Know About FaceApp
First, the application became a sensation among everyone on the internet and with that came the #privacy concerns. App has been in news for a while now. Here's the infographic on Everything You Need to Know About FaceApp! What is that FaceApp? * FaceApp is is a photo-morphing app that uses artificial intelligence and neural editing technology to manipulate your face through a number of clever filters. * It has features like impression & color filters, lens blur and changing age, hairstyle, gender with the use of AI etc. * It was first launched in January 2017, by a small team out of Saint-Petersburg, Russia named Wireless Lab. How does it work? * It can use photos from your library or alternative sources, users can also snap a photo within the app * Photos are uploaded to cloud run by Amazon and Google for server-side processing * App is powered by Machine learning and in terms of the specific technology it’s using to alter selfies in a photorealistic way, FaceApp makes use of “deep generative convolutional neural networks” Why is it Viral? Two main reasons we see are- * Due to its a feature to see future and younger versions of a person's face which is highly realistic and gives accurate results * Celebrities like Drake, Cardi B, Avengers cast, Stranger Things cast, and many more shared AI-aged selfies on social media Privacy Panic! * As quickly as the app has gone viral, so have the privacy worries. So much so that US Senator Chuck Schumer has called for the FBI to investigate the app * Terms and conditions of FaceApp meant that app has access to all of the photos on your phone, so if developers chose to do so, they could conceivably tell the app to upload all or your photos to their servers or pass them on to other organisations * Fact that it is Russian based, amplified the scepticism * Close research suggests FaceApp isn’t doing anything particularly unusual in either its code or its network traffic
