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It's not clear what is the potential threat this specific app introduces. A nation state can easily perform facial recognition on the majority of the human race by scraping social media.
There is no threat model for an iPhone app to do nefarious things in an App Store distributed app on a non-jailbroken phone. At most, FaceApp grabs the picture you uploaded and some minor meta-data that every app using an analytics tool (read: all of them) collects. This is political grand-standing at best, and would be a non-issue if you replaced the geographic location of the dev team with any other countries I get…
This is a legitimate threat model. I'm not sure why you think it wouldn't be. Spies and others do use fake identities. The threat model is that there is that there is a way to determine who is faking their identities.
It's not clear what is the potential threat this specific app introduces. A nation state can easily perform facial recognition on the majority of the human race by scraping social media.
Many foreign nation states might have access to like, 500x400 pixel photos of people. Not 12 megapixel direct front selfie camera taken photos, where the person is intentionally trying to get the highest quality photo possible.
There is no threat model for an iPhone app to do nefarious things in an App Store distributed app on a non-jailbroken phone. At most, FaceApp grabs the picture you uploaded and some minor meta-data that every app using an analytics tool (read: all of them) collects. This is political grand-standing at best, and would be a non-issue if you replaced the geographic location of the dev team with any other countries I get…
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/12/02/russia-bans-iphone...
It's a tit-for-tat response, showing that if they want to make this a trade war, their companies will get hurt too. So yes, national grandstanding.
Edit: Wups, dates are wrong. This FBI release is from November 25, so the Russian law is likely in response to it, not vice versa. Still national grandstanding, but the idiot party isn't necessarily the Russians.
Looks like the FBI designated FaceApp as a threat because of its crazy data policy and its Russian origin. Even though I think it's a really shady app, that's a pretty low bar.
It says potential threat, not threat, and according to this letter, the Russian government can access ISP data directly without request.
Australian government metadata requests was well over 300,000 last year, nearly 1000 requests a day all warrantless, can come from tiny local councils or horse racing orgs. Trust us, they say, there's oversight in hidden tribunals, they say.
There is no threat model for an iPhone app to do nefarious things in an App Store distributed app on a non-jailbroken phone. At most, FaceApp grabs the picture you uploaded and some minor meta-data that every app using an analytics tool (read: all of them) collects. This is political grand-standing at best, and would be a non-issue if you replaced the geographic location of the dev team with any other countries I get…
By "non-jailbroken" you should mean "jailbreakable": it is the existence of the vulnerability that makes the phone insecure, not the user having used an exploit to leverage that vulnerability to do something for them. Like, for no avoidance of doubt: if you are running a version of iOS for which you can download an app-based jailbreak (which has been all jailbreaks for current phones that have been released for years…
It's not clear what is the potential threat this specific app introduces. A nation state can easily perform facial recognition on the majority of the human race by scraping social media.
Many foreign nation states might have access to like, 500x400 pixel photos of people. Not 12 megapixel direct front selfie camera taken photos, where the person is intentionally trying to get the highest quality photo possible.
Plenty of chinese apps under "utility" category is flooding the us consumers...
Notably ES File Explorer was recently removed form the Google play store because of suspicious behavior. One of the most popular Android file managers.
There is no threat model for an iPhone app to do nefarious things in an App Store distributed app on a non-jailbroken phone. At most, FaceApp grabs the picture you uploaded and some minor meta-data that every app using an analytics tool (read: all of them) collects. This is political grand-standing at best, and would be a non-issue if you replaced the geographic location of the dev team with any other countries I get…
The threat model is that this photo is shared with the Russian government and then the Russian government can match American citizens (or potentially people working in intelligence), and then using that in facial recognition programs. I.e. they can differentiate Americans (insert x country) from their own citizens and know who to watch more carefully. This is a legitimate threat model. I'm not sure why you think it w…