FaceApp Age Filter

Submission 36,218

Part of a series on FaceApp. [View Related Entries]

About

FaceApp Age Filter refers to an image-altering tool available in the photo editing application FaceApp, making photographs of humans uploaded by users appear older.

Origin

Launched in 2017, FaceApp is a mobile device application that allows users to edit photographs of humans. These edits include manipulating the age, race or gender of the subject.

While the app has featured aging features in the past, on July 9th and 10th, 2019, FaceApp updates its application for iTunes and Android, respectively according to iTunes^[1] and APK4Fun.^[2] These updates included "Even more performance improvements to Editor processing. Enjoy real-time results while slider moving!"

By July 12th, people on Instagram began using the hashtag #agechallenge^[5] to catalog examples of photographs that had been edited using FaceApp's age filter. The earliest known example was posted by Instagram^[6] user @fahadalaliwa. The post received more than 2,000 likes in four days (shown below). That day, others on Instagram begin using the #agechallenge hashtag.

Spread

On July 13th Egyptian actress Reem Elbaroudy posted a photograph on Instagram^[3] of herself with the filter on. She tagged the photograph with the hashtag "#agechallenge." The post received more than 38,000 likes in four days (shown below, left). On the same day, Redditor ^[4] gymbez posted an image of their child with the filter on. The post received more than 230 points (85% upvoted) and 30 comments.

Numerous media outlets reported on the application's feature, including The Sun,^[7] PopBuzz,^[8] BoredPanda,^[9] BuzzFeed, ^[10] Newsweek^[11] and more.

Security Concerns

After the photo effect went viral, some online security researchers and reporters began voicing concerns about the app, how it works and its terms of service agreement. Twitter^[12] user @ElizabethPW tweeted a piece of the terms of service agreement, explaining that users who have agreed to FaceApp's terms gave much more than one photograph to the company's servers. They wrote, "If you use #FaceApp you are giving them a license to use your photos, your name, your username, and your likeness for any purpose including commercial purposes (like on a billboard or internet ad)." The post received more than 16,000 retweets and 13,000 likes in 24 hours (shown below).

Others, like Senate Chuck Schumer, voiced their concerns. Senator Schumer reached out to the FBI and the Federal Trade Commision to investigate the app, writing "It would be deeply troubling if the sensitive personal information of U.S. citizens was provided to a hostile foreign power actively engaged in cyber hostilities against the United States."

TechCrunch^[13] noted other concerns with the app, specifically regarding FaceApp's process of storing uploaded photographs in the cloud and that the app "appears to be overriding settings if a user had denied access to their camera roll, after people reported they could still select and upload a photo -- i.e. despite the app not having permission to access their photos." However, the latter concern is allowed behavior on Apple's iOS operating system, giving "users the power to choose to block an app from full camera roll access but select individual photos to upload if they so wish."

FaceApp explained that all photo manipulation takes place in the cloud. Those photos might stay in the cloud for "performance and traffic" but will likely be deleted after 48 years. They also claimed to delete user data upon request and that they do not "sell or share any user data with any third parties" (read the full statement below).

We are receiving a lot of inquiries regarding our privacy policy and therefore, would like to provide a few points that explain the basics:

1. FaceApp performs most of the photo processing in the cloud. We only upload a photo selected by a user for editing. We never transfer any other images from the phone to the cloud.

2. We might store an uploaded photo in the cloud. The main reason for that is performance and traffic: we want to make sure that the user doesn’t upload the photo repeatedly for every edit operation. Most images are deleted from our servers within 48 hours from the upload date.

3. We accept requests from users for removing all their data from our servers. Our support team is currently overloaded, but these requests have our priority. For the fastest processing, we recommend sending the requests from the FaceApp mobile app using “Settings→Support→Report a bug” with the word “privacy” in the subject line. We are working on the better UI for that.

4. All FaceApp features are available without logging in, and you can log in only from the settings screen. As a result, 99% of users don’t log in; therefore, we don’t have access to any data that could identify a person.

5. We don’t sell or share any user data with any third parties.

6. Even though the core R&D team is located in Russia, the user data is not transferred to Russia.

Additionally, we’d like to comment on one of the most common concerns: all pictures from the gallery are uploaded to our servers after a user grants access to the photos (for example, https://twitter.com/joshuanozzi/status/1150961777548701696). We don’t do that. We upload only a photo selected for editing. You can quickly check this with any of network sniffing tools available on the internet.

The New York Times^[14] concluded that neither they nor other experts were able to find evidence of the concerns outlined by users. They wrote that experts they spoke to "found no evidence on Apple or Android phones that FaceApp was secretly uploading entire photo galleries. But each voiced concern that the app, like many others, failed to alert users that their data was being uploaded to remote servers."

French security researcher Baptiste Robert told the Times, "The info sent by the application was only my device model, my device ID and Android version, which is very limited information and is quite common for an application." However, Robert told the outlet, "I’m quite happy, to be honest, because people are starting to be interested by this kind of question and they start to understand that, O.K., maybe there are some privacy concerns."

Growing Old Edits

Growing Old Edits refers to a series of memes set to the Up soundtrack composition "Married Life" by in which various meme-famous characters are shown growing old and disappearing. Usually executed via FaceApp smile and age filters, the trend originated on Twitter in mid-August 2019 and spread to Instagram in the following days.