If you've been on social media recently, you might have felt like you've stepped into a digital time machine.
A whole heap of Instagram and Twitter users who have been swept up in the latest viral trend that's seen youth take a back seat and elderly versions of ourselves pop up via FaceApp, and the #AgeChallenge.
This included celebrities like Drake,
The Jonas Brothers,
And the Feed's very own Jenna and Vic.
As with any viral online trend, people are starting to have some concerns, and not just about who is getting access to your data (the app is owned by a Russian company)...
... but just what data you're really sharing.
As FaceApp boasts over 80 million active users, many are worried about the excessive rights the app has to the photos people upload to it.
The app's terms of use does appear to gloss over what it might do with the photos that users upload. But there are some pretty unsettling phrases, like:
"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."
Translation: in using the app, you've kind of signed over the rights to your face (in the photos at least).
But this might not warrant a full-on panic.
While this all sounds disturbing, renowned security researcher, Robert Baptiste (under the Twitter alias, Elliot Alderson), said the worrying was overblown.
In an interview, Baptiste responded to claims the app had access to all users' photos - not just the ones they had selected to morph - saying there was no evidence that was happening.
He did raise another point to consider, though:
So what about those other apps?
Snapchat has near identical Terms of Service. The words nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, distribute and display are just some of the familiar terms that appear.
Vox reported that Snapchat collects geographical information and has access to private messages, photos and contacts.
TikTok has notified users that it can access your data not just from your immediate profile, but any third-party source you link in (like other social networks). This data could include contact lists and activity information. They're also building third party information on you, like age and demographic data.
Instagram is in the Facebook family - it was acquired by the company back in 2012. Although it's fairly quiet on the topic, it does share data collection efforts with the Zuckerberg site. Instagram's privacy policy says it does use 'cookies' to collect information on you, including tech from a third party. It also says that it will share that data with other businesses that are 'legally part of the same group', meaning both Facebook and WhatsApp.
