If you’ve ventured onto social media at some point in the past 48 hours, you will have seen the end products of FaceApp.

Using artificial intelligence, the app ages photos you upload, guessing where you’ll wrinkle, where your hairline will recede to, and what parts of your face will sag over the years.

What’s not to love?

The AI used is pretty darn impressive, because some folks ended up looking eerily like their parents.

When it emerged that the app is owned and made by Russians, though, people started to wonder if it was all part of some nefarious strategy to get access to your photos, or create a database for later use.

Rather than panic prematurely, the Washington Post reached out to FaceApp CEO Yaroslav Goncharov, and asked five questions that need answering.

Here’s that exchange:

1. What data do they take?

FaceApp uploads and processes our photos in the cloud, Goncharov said, but the app will “only upload a photo selected by a user for editing.” The rest of your camera roll stays on your phone.

You can also use FaceApp without giving it your name or email — and 99 percent of users do just that, he said.

2. How long do they hold on my data?

The app’s terms of service grant it a “perpetual” license to our photos. Goncharov said FaceApp deletes “most” of the photos from its servers after 48 hours.

3. What are they doing with my data?

Is FaceApp using our faces and the maps it makes of them for anything other than the express purpose of the app, such as running facial identification on us? “No,” Goncharov said.

Legally, though, the app’s terms give it — and whoever might buy it or work with it in the future — the right to do whatever it wants, through an “irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferrable sub-licensable license.”

That sounds worrying, and we’ll come back to that later.

4. Who has access to my data?

Do government authorities in Russia have access to our photos? “No,” Goncharov said. FaceApp’s engineers are based in Russia, so our data is not transferred there. He said the company also doesn’t “sell or share any user data with any third parties” — aside, I pointed out, from what it shares with trackers from Facebook and AdMob.

5. How can I delete my data?

Just deleting the app won’t get rid of the photos FaceApp may have in the cloud. Goncharov said people can put in a request to delete all data from FaceApp’s servers, but the process is convoluted.

“For the fastest processing, we recommend sending the requests from the FaceApp mobile app using ‘Settings->Support->Report a bug’ with the word ‘privacy’ in the subject line. We are working on the better UI [user interface] for that,” he said.

It should be remembered that the above information comes from the FaceApp CEO, and some people aren’t buying everything he has to say.

Politicians in the US have already called on people to delete the app immediately, and others are warning about potentially perilous consequences.

In an article written yesterday, Forbes tech journalist John Koetsier highlighted a few issues worth touching on:

While according to FaceApp’s terms of service people still own their own “user content” (read: face), the company owns a never-ending and irrevocable royalty-free license to do anything they want with it … That doesn’t mean the app’s Russian parent company, Wireless Labs, will offer your face to the FSB, but it does have consequences…

You might end up on a billboard somewhere in Moscow, but your face will most likely end up training some AI facial-recognition algorithm.

Whether that matters to you or not is your decision.

At some stage, you almost want to throw your hands up in the air and say ‘so what, all of my data is probably already compromised, I want to see what I will look like as an old fart, and I don’t care’.

I can respect that.

Others, especially those who play in the tech and privacy game, advise caution:

…what we have learned in the past few years about viral Facebook apps is that the data they collect is not always used for the purposes that we might assume. And, that the data collected is not always stored securely, safely, privately.

As former Rackspace manager Rob La Gesse mentioned today, “To make FaceApp actually work, you have to give it permissions to access your photos – ALL of them. But it also gains access to Siri and Search …. Oh, and it has access to refreshing in the background – so even when you are not using it, it is using you”.

The app doesn’t have to be doing anything nefarious today to make you cautious about giving it that much access to your most personal computing device.

I will forgive you if you have lost interest by now, because your friend just sent you a FaceApp picture of them looking George Clooney-esque in their old age.

We break briefly for a look at Gordon Ramsay as an old man:

Moving on.

For those who have stuck around, the gist goes something like this – privacy concerns over viral photo apps are totally valid, but often overblown.

Ultimately, according to Vox, rather than some Russians plotting evil deeds with your photos, it’s just about the money:

It is definitely weird that FaceApp is retaining your photos for possible “commercial use.” I assume this is so it can continue using them to train new AI-based features, but who knows? Maybe you are Russian stock photography now!

However, the biggest motive for FaceApp to collect your information is most likely ad targeting, and the motive to make a scary face-aging filter is likely just to jack up downloads so that more people are dumping info into the data set. There is really no reason to believe that the Russian government is doing something scary with pictures of your face.

Use it, don’t use it, your call.

Makes a nice change from all the baby pictures, anyway.

[sources:washpost&forbes&vox]