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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
In this episode of the show, we're gonna talk about the controversy surrounding Face app. You know, you start young, you end old. Let's dive into it. So you've probably seen both the good and the bad about face out. This week, it started off early this week with the age challenge on Instagram and Twitter where people were showing up with uh current face and aged out 2030 years and the results are really, really interesting.
Um You know, we've seen Drake Old with sort of a salt and pepper beard and looking wiser and popular politicians thrown through the filter. Um celebrities sharing what they might look like down the road and it's really fascinating. Everyone's having a good chuckle, but then things took a bit of a darker turn.
There's been a lot of controversy around the security and privacy of this application, but what's really going on? Well, I've had the opportunity to speak to a few journalists to run a few stories to help clarify some of this. So we're going to share that in this episode of the show.
So just so you know what face app is, is a mobile app on I Os and on Android and you put in your um, selfie and you and then manipulate what it looks like using various filters. Now, this isn't like Snapchat where you're putting on silly filters or themed filters or things like that.
The idea behind Face app is that you can see yourself in different scenarios. This app has been around since 2017 and over that time, they've built out a number of filters you can put on, you know, facial hair, you can have glasses, you can change the color of your hair, you can change your hairstyles, you can add makeup, you can do all sorts of things to see what you might look like sporting a different style.
And this app isn't without controversy years ago or a year or two year and a bit ago, let's say a year and a bit ago for a couple of hours, they had an ethnicity changing filter that raised a massive, massive uproar and the company immediately yanked it.
And over time, they've actually built out a pro subscription model as well where if you pay for the access to the features, you can get advanced features and apply more filters and the filters are a little more finely tuned. So this is just a playing around with, uh you know, your image app um so that you can see what you might look like on under circumstances and, you know, barring the missteps around like ethnicity, it's kind of cool to see what color, uh you know, what you might look like as a blonde.
Um, or if you had a beard or different makeup style or glasses, no glasses, that kind of stuff. It's, it's really just designed to be fun. But what is raised all the controversy? Well, a few things initially, there was reports and rumbling on social media that it was actually uploading a bunch more data than people thought.
Well, those have been thoroughly debunked. But what was happening was that the image processing was not done locally, the original user experience. And up until late this week on Thursday, the application, the developer made a change. But up until that change, it felt very much like the all the photo manipulation was being done locally.
It wasn't, it was being done in the cloud kudos to them for having a fast cloud back end to get it back to you. But it was uploading your image without your knowledge necessarily. That's a problem. Now they've added a dialogue box that warns you on first use that says, hey, this is going into the cloud to be processed.
But why does that impact we have so many cloud services? It really shouldn't matter, should it? Well, it does because in this case, the terms of service and the privacy policy for Face app are pretty egregious. Now, I would put them as worse than Facebook and Twitter and Facebook and Twitter are pretty bad for some of this stuff.
But the difference is in, you know, you'll see some um countering arguments on social around the impact of this. But really what it says with the privacy policy in the terms of service add up to is that with the photos that you upload to the service. So any photo, you apply a filter to the company has unlimited rights to do whatever they want with, they can sell it, they can reuse it um in advertising, they can use it for further training their models, any number of things.
So obviously, that's beyond what most social media services and what most apps ask for. What most apps get within the terms of service is essentially a license, a royalty for your license so that they can actually show it to other people legally because you own the copyright around those images and they need a license in order to share them with your friends and things like that.
So having an unlimited license that allows this the developer behind face app to sell things that's pushing things too far, especially when people weren't really aware that their photos were actually being uploaded to the cloud. Um Now, the other challenge there is if you're uploading additional information.
Now, if you're not using the sharing features, right? Within the application, there's only metadata around your photo that's going up. So it's not necessarily associated to your name. Um So it's not a case of having a profile shot for your identity. Um Though that would be easy enough to correlate from social media and so forth.
But if you do add those connectors, if you leverage the Twitter or the Facebook connector within the app, they're going to have that correlation. And now you've given them license to use your face and they know who you are. So you may be more likely to be used because they can correlate it.
But really it's a matter of privacy. So essentially anything that you upload to this application is going to be public. So any photo you apply a filter to in the app is public, that's the choice. You have no control and that's what's really different compared to social media because normally on social media, you still have some measure of control and that's it.
Everything else behind this people are freaking out and saying because it's a Russian developer, you really should be concerned. I guarantee you if you look into the teams that have developed the apps on your phone, there is a multitude of countries represented. So people just have a kick back or a natural bias when it comes to cyber security or privacy.
And Russia, I like to say things on a case by case basis. So yes, the terms of service and the licensing and the grants and permissions of the company get from the photos are egregious. There is nothing, there is no solid evidence to indicate anything more malicious than that.
If you don't have any identity data associated, if you aren't using those sharing connectors, they are not building this surreptitious identity database. So you saw in the US, the political parties had recommended people don't use this because you're helping out an enemy in order to build up this facial recognition system.
Let me tell you the reality is you're uploading most of these photos to social media anyway, um which is far more directly linked to your identity and people are harvesting and uh scraping social media left, right and center. So it's not nearly as big of an issue as everybody blew it up to.
But for me, the biggest takeaway was that far too few people, far too few people, excuse me, actually read through the terms of service and actually read through the privacy policy and only a fraction of those people understand the implications of it because this terms of service had a bunch of things that sounded like fine.
OK, great. They're limited. But then a few clauses that basically negated those previous clauses and gave them anything they wanted to. And of course, the CEO of the company came out and said, hey, this is what we do with the photos and that's great. And I fully believe what his statements were, which is essentially their only cash for processing for a little bit and then deleted it off the servers because it cost him money to store them.
Right. And if he's not making money off of it, why would he store them? Um, I totally understand that. But the problem is, is that legally he, the company is allowed to do whatever they want photos. So, while they may not be doing something like reselling them or using them in advertising or using them as stock photography or things like that, now, they have the legal right to do that.
And that's the challenge. But that key issue again comes back to reading the terms of service. I know it's dry. I know it's boring, but we agree to so many things and this was such a cool thing to get on and see how you look older. Um People wanted to get in on it and I understand that, but the short term game may not be worth the reward if you've been watching the show for any length of time, you know, that I don't think any choice is necessarily better except if it's a choice that's made implicitly and not explicitly.
And I think that's what happened with this app that people were, didn't understand that it was being processed in the cloud and the implications of that process and gave that company full rights to use that image in that photo that you uploaded. So if you uploaded an image of somebody else, they have now have full legal rights to use that.
And I think that's the problem is that people jumped into this and implicitly accepted this bargain when they weren't aware of the full implications. That's really the key takeaway. There's no need to panic, make the choice yourself. If you're OK with the photo, you're uploading, being public and being reused for commercial purposes.
Go ahead. You can see from the thumbnail for this video. I did it myself as a sample just to see the experience and I understood the risk and I took it on willingly and I think that's absolutely critical. So yes, it's boring but reasons the terms of service to know what you're getting into.
What do you think? Let me know, hit me up online at Mark NC A in the comments down below. And as always by email me at Mark N dot C A, look forward to talking to you this have a fantastic day and we'll see you on the next episode of the show.
