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FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

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Re: FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

#91

Hmm. Would it be possible to run these Apps in a VM like container? allow it access a dummy, empty folder to read from somewhat of a container for all apps? then there would be a manual transfer process between the shared folders after you've saved an image? So when downloading an App it will ask would you want to run this in an isolated environment? and you can, so if it tries to scan over your photo gallery it will…

> to run these Apps in a VM like container?

That's what Xposed Framework does exactly.

> allow it access a dummy, empty folder to read from

That's what Xposed XPrivacyLua plugin does exactly.

https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua

Re: FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

#92
post #20

We keep harping on about privacy, and then shit like this happens. There are two possible conclusions to draw. One is that the general public actually doesn’t care about privacy at all. It’s a niche concern. The other is that the general public cares but is completely and utterly clueless about how to defend themselves, to the point that an app can literally say “give us your name and face and we can do whatever we w…

How soon the public forgets about Equifax data breaches, but goes into a panic when they opt-in for face filters.

Re: FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

#93
post #16

The coverage on FaceApp and the way they talk about it is ridiculous. When it comes for instance to Snapchat's numbers, the coverage is about the success of the company. How is FaceApp different than all other apps and social networks that are storing all your photos with location and tags to your friends except that FaceApp is a Russian company? I'm not defending FaceApp. I don't use social networks either for the s…

Side point, I also don’t use social media app but at this point it doesn’t matter. 3 of my friends sent me my faceapp photo. No way to escape this.

If you wanted to escape it you could use something like This Person Does Not Exist and submit large numbers of fake people with your name to the app such that nobody would be able to tell which was the real you.

Of course, to do it well, you'd probably want to start doing it before anybody submitted your real photo, then just submit a fake picture at random intervals for perpetuity.

An alternate variation on this is flooding them with fake people and fake names to make their real database worth less.

Re: FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

#94
post #72
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What argument do you use to prove them wrong?

I usually say something to the tune of "everyone has something to hide, that's why we put clothes on; that's why we don't go around broadcasting our medical test results; that's why we don't reveal our salaries and benefits to our colleagues (or anyone); that's why we don't give our address to anyone that asks for it. It doesn't mean we've done something bad or we're criminals, it just means we're human. But if you h…

Neither of the links to deleted blog posts appear to be working

Re: FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

#95
post #20

We keep harping on about privacy, and then shit like this happens. There are two possible conclusions to draw. One is that the general public actually doesn’t care about privacy at all. It’s a niche concern. The other is that the general public cares but is completely and utterly clueless about how to defend themselves, to the point that an app can literally say “give us your name and face and we can do whatever we w…

I think we're not giving the general public enough credit. These discussions always seem to come down to "no one cares about privacy" or "they care but they're idiots." I think many people care about privacy and generally understand the issues, but are making conscious trade-offs that make sense for them.

For the vast majority of people—who are boring, non-activist, law-abiding citizens—the value they assign to privacy of things like name/face/products they're interested in is nonzero, but very low. They know their name/face, along with far more sensitive information, is already in a lot of databases that matter more than anything some random app developer can do, and they get some greater value from the marginal privacy impact of that same information ending up in one more place.

There's a good bit of research to support this. For example, there is a study showing you'd have to pay someone on average $1,000+ [1] to give up their Facebook account for year, suggesting that's the value they assign to the service. At the same time, if you ask them how much they'd be willing to pay for an ads-free, more privacy conscious version of Facebook, studies show only a small fraction would pay even $15/month [2]. In other words, people are making a conscious assessment that their privacy is less valuable than the services they can get by giving it up.

We make these kind of trade-offs and decisions every day. It's much the same reason people can be both deeply concerned about child labor in the Global South, but still make the decision to buy the cheaper version of a product rather than the one they know is ethically sourced, even if they could afford the latter. These decisions certainly have societal impacts that are worth contemplating and being concerned about, but it's wrong and infantilizing to simply dismiss people's conscious and rational (for them) choices.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [2] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17225328/facebook-ads-free-pai...

Re: FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

#96
post #41

Is "what your face looks like" private information? You publicly display your face everywhere you go all the time. It's not really practical to hide it. Likewise your name you pretty much freely give out to anyone who asks. Is that private information? So Faceapp knows "There's a person with this name who looks like this". Was that supposed to be a secret? I'm concerned about privacy too, but it seems like some peopl…

Faceapp knows what 150M faces look like. That concentration of information is valuable. Google built a fortune by taking freely available information and organizing it for easy access. In the case of faceapp there are many nefarious actors who could serve as clients.

Re: FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

#97
post #6

Aren't contracts with unlimited time periods non-binding? I was under the impression that any contract that said perpetual anything could be trivially disregarded. Or is that a regional thing?

I am not a lawyer, but dear gawd, how would that even work? I can imagine a huge number of domains where a time limit would make interaction unfeasible. - I am buying my house for perpetuity, not leasing it for a limited period - I'm a photographer, you're a model, I want a model release that's unlimited or it's not worth my time and risk to deal with you (this is usually framed as "rights" or "license", but signed i…

See DinkDink's reply for what I was thinking of.

You're buying a house for as long as you can afford property taxes. :P

Re: FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

#98
post #41

Is "what your face looks like" private information? You publicly display your face everywhere you go all the time. It's not really practical to hide it. Likewise your name you pretty much freely give out to anyone who asks. Is that private information? So Faceapp knows "There's a person with this name who looks like this". Was that supposed to be a secret? I'm concerned about privacy too, but it seems like some peopl…

I think you've put that very well.

All I'm wondering is how this would play out in a dystopian future where I'm recognised by everyone wherever I go.

And in some cases they might even have additional information maybe in a probabilistic fashion. Like what kind of clothes I prefer or the kinds of food I like. And that would be the good version.

The worse scenario would be that some malicious actor puts all this together to play on others' fears.

The worst case, of course, being big brother!

Re: FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side point, I also don’t use social media app but at this point it doesn’t matter. 3 of my friends sent me my faceapp photo. No way to escape this.

If you wanted to escape it you could use something like This Person Does Not Exist and submit large numbers of fake people with your name to the app such that nobody would be able to tell which was the real you. Of course, to do it well, you'd probably want to start doing it before anybody submitted your real photo, then just submit a fake picture at random intervals for perpetuity. An alternate variation on this is…

Surely that's not going to work. You'd create many fake people linked to your name, but your own face will still be one. You'd have to create enough "face hashes" to DDoS a recognition computer .. seems unlikely.

Re: FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names

#100
post #88
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually say something to the tune of "everyone has something to hide, that's why we put clothes on; that's why we don't go around broadcasting our medical test results; that's why we don't reveal our salaries and benefits to our colleagues (or anyone); that's why we don't give our address to anyone that asks for it. It doesn't mean we've done something bad or we're criminals, it just means we're human. But if you h…

Your links are truncated.

Oops, my bad, fixed.
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