The Al-powered selfie-editing app, FaceApp, recently sparked a new viral challenge, but now, it is responding to users’ privacy concerns.
According to TechCrunch, some questions were floating around about whether the app uploads your camera roll in the background. While TechCrunch’s investigation found no evidence of this, customers say the Russian developed app can somehow access your photos without permission.
However, FaceApp responded to customers concerns in a statement saying, “Another issue raised by FaceApp users was that the iOS app appears to be overriding settings if a user had denied access to their camera roll, after people reported they could still select and upload a photo — i.e. despite the app not having permission to access their photos.”
The developers went on to say“As we reported earlier, the latter is actually allowed behavior in iOS — which gives users the power to choose to block an app from full camera roll access but select individual photos to upload if they so wish.”
According to TechCrunch, this is a criticism of Apple and its ability to inform users in a “better way of describing the permission,” as TechCrunch had previously suggested.
As it relates to another big concern which is cloud processing as facial data, FaceApp did confirm that most of the processing needed to power its app’s beautifying/genderbending or age-accelerating effects are done in the cloud.
Face app did reveal that it might store the photos you just have chosen to upload in the cloud for a temporary period. However, it added that this is done for “performance and traffic” to make sure that a user doesn’t repeatedly upload the same photo to carry out another edit.
The app developers claimed that they only keep images on their servers for about 48 hours from the upload date and also confirmed that they do not sell or share any user information with any third parties.
In the meantime, according to FaceApp, users can request their data be deleted, but that the company “doesn’t yet have a very smooth way to do this.”
