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

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111–120 of 249 posts

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

#111
post #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 priva…

What is the difference between “people don’t care about privacy” and “people value Facebook highly, wouldn’t pay much of anything for an ad-free, privacy conscious version of Facebook, and are making a conscious assessment that their privacy is less valuable than the service,” other than the additional detail?

It seems to me that you’re complaining about infantilizing people’s choices while simultaneously telling us that, yes, people indeed don’t care about privacy very much.

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

#112

Every one I know is already using either Facebook Messenger (which has the same face scanning features) and/or Snapchat (which also has this feature). This is not new. I've been using FaceApp since its release. There are a lot of other similar apps that I've used in the past. Especially makeup simulator apps. BeautyPlus, YouCal, InstaBeauty, BeautyCam, Facetune, Photo Plastic, Visage Lab, etc.

I think FaceApp in particular strikes a chord in the United States because it's owned by a Russian Company. Name + faces (and therefore age and gender and race) + Location is the kind of data that enabled a lot of granular facebook ad targeting in 2016.

> I think FaceApp in particular strikes a chord in the United States because it's owned by a Russian Company.

So, it's purely Xenophobia then.

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

#113
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.

People got very upset about Equifax, it’s just that there’s approximately nothing we can do about them. Our choice is for Equifax to have all our info, or refrain from partitipating in the modern financial system.

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

#114

I wonder if a neural network could be trained to recognise people who "look honest" or who "look like they'll repay their loans" (aka, profitable credit scoring data).

>I wonder if a neural network could be trained to recognise people... who "look like they'll repay their loans"

And that is how you get bigoted algorithms. This will just select for older white men due to various socioeconomic reasons.

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

#115
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a scoping issue. On iOS devices at least no app has access to your photo gallery unless they explicitly prompt you for permission. That said, many apps need access to the photo gallery - say I want to put a screenshot into discord. The issue is that now Discord has access to ALL of my photos. There needs to be more scoping options. "Allow access to previous 12 photos while you're using the app" kinda deal.

On iOS is't possible to ask the system to present a photo picker on behalf of the app without requiring a permission to look into your photos.

I'm not an iOS developer but if it does exist not many apps use it. Snapchat, MS Teams, Discord, and a few others don't do it by default at least.

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

#116
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…

Two wrongs don't make a right. Your point may be valid that Snapchat deserves the same or even more criticism, but then perhaps the fact that they don't is the real problem.

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

#117
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…

Snapchat already had their "end of the world" moment when they were brand new around underage sexting.

It's just what happens when you're a new hot social app.

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

#118
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.

yeah thats a real concern. not only do you have to worry about your own security but that of your friends and family.

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

#119
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?

The language from their terms of service ( https://faceapp.com/terms ) is this: > 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 y…

Not in Europe. I’m sure lawyers are excited.

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

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, maybe it should be the other way round. You should link many faces of yourself to the people that legally exist but have no social media presence but are registered and exist. You can find those kinds of people in countries like Germany
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