Concern escalated further when people started to point out that FaceApp is Russian. “The app that you’re willingly giving all your facial data to says the company’s location is in Saint-Petersburg, Russia,” tweeted the New York Times’s Charlie Warzel. And we all know what those Russians are like, don’t we? They want to harvest your data for nefarious purposes. Unlike American techies, of course. Who are always deeply respectful when it comes to personal data, and only use your private information to make the world a better, more connected, place.
By Wednesday things had calmed down a little bit. A French security researcher who uses the pseudonym Elliot Alderson ran a check on the app and found it was not actually uploading your entire camera roll – just the photo you were modifying. Which is what you’d expect from an app like that. Speaking to me over the phone, Alderson said he also couldn’t find any evidence it was stealing all your data; it was just getting your device ID and your device model. Which, again, is pretty much to be expected. The reason the app was causing such a fuss, Alderson hypothesized, was because of fears about Russia. [...]
In May Google researchers also disclosed that they had used 2,000 YouTube videos of people doing the mannequin challenge (the viral challenge where you stay still) to help train an AI model on predicting the depth of a moving object in a video. The researchers also released their data set for future research, meaning there’s no saying how that data will be used in the future. That video you made as a joke might be helping to train anything from a self-driving car to a killer drone.
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