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

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131–140 of 249 posts

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

#131
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…

Side note, but sharing salaries with colleagues is actually a good idea, due to the unfairness that can arise from salaries being kept secret. Example article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/smarter-living/pay-secrec...

Interesting article and interesting opinion. I particularly like this quote: "Employers can get away with paying workers less when those workers don’t talk about money." I find it to be very true.

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

#132
Solid is a MIT project aiming to improve privacy and data ownership, founded with Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Perhaps this kind of initiatives and blockchain will remind people what valuable data they are sharing.

Information Economy should directly incentivize those who share their identity, I couldnt imagine some stanger in the street asking me for all this information, and me giving it without a doubt. It is scary but it's normalized.

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

#133
Some commentors point out that though they never put their faces into the app, their family and friends did upload their faces without consent. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from just fishing through public DBs and uploading just about anything into the app.

There are issues of consent, of what is 'personal' data, of who 'owns' that data, of public vs. private, etc.

We've all been on this ride for a while now and it's not getting any more clear. If anything, it's getting more and more murky. Deepfakes are now able to be done on a laptop, essentially. EULAs are basically ghosts, the public cannot understand/see them but is terrorized by them at random. Privacy is meaningless despite it's proven requirement for proper adolescent/human development.

I think we're in a time now where we need a new idea and a new way of doing things and thinking about our world, where a paradigm shift is required.

Our ideas of personal data, of public data, of private data, of consent, and of ownership are no long going to work. The ethics aside, the old ways of doing things are not workable anymore.

What does a flawed, yet workable, solution look like?

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

#136
post #108
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…

These arguments are exactly why most people I meet say they don't care how much info they give to random apps. They assume since Google has all the info already anyway, why should they care if one more nameless faceless corp gets it? Plus companies have had all this personal data for a long time now and nothing bad has happened. The only argument I've had even a little success with is "it makes it easier for identity…

I feel it's very easy to counter this argument too. A person can choose to trust specific persons/organizations/governments with their personal information. For example they'll share secrets with some friends but not with all of them. But from there to go to "oh well I've given it to one I might as well just give it to all of them" is very naive and I would even say defeatist.

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

#137
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The app doesn't request Geolocation data, but might the geographic info still be in the EXIF data in the photo that gets uploaded?

Yep this is correct, location history can be scraped from the EXIF data in the photos in your camera roll.

[deleted]

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

#138
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…

It's because there's not been a lot of scary things happening yet. Or if they have, it's been on individuals - like someone seeing themselves on a billboard or advert. But because the datasets are so massive, people are reduced to statistics which is a lot less scary. Of course, if you look at history that can change overnight. Or actually it won't, it's more likely a "boiling frog" kinda thing where nobody's aware o…

> someone seeing themselves on a billboard or advert

I just pictured 4chan hacking into a photo database and putting people's faces on a bunch of billboards.

Surely if this happened to more people, the public would become more privacy-conscious, no?

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

#139
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep this is correct, location history can be scraped from the EXIF data in the photos in your camera roll.

Does Apple allow disabling the exif feature in the camera app like Android?

You can disable Location Service for the Camera app in the Privacy Settings.

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

#140
This is entirely standard legalese language that ALL apps that handle data on your behalf will have in their ToS. It sounds broad and nefarious, and it most certainly CAN be used in such a way, but it is what they need to be granted, lest they get sued by someone for obvious things such as creating derivative works (i.e. the altered face), hosting the images somewhere, being able to make a profit at all off their business, and so on.

Go look up other ToS for similar services, it is almost verbatim the same wording.

My problem is that this is the "least amount" of permissions to realistically make a media centric app, because legally, there's nothing stopping them from abusing the hell out of these rights.

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