Posts for 2019

A great deal has been said about FaceApp, which for some inexplicable reason is probably the hottest deepfake-for-fun app on the market right now, and how Russians are using the data collected to gather information on our faces.


For some background, FaceApp is one of those mobile apps people use to upload facial photographs (usually their own) and perform digital surgery on, to see how they'll look as older or younger people, as the opposite sex, with facial hair, and so on. It's good silly fun, though it was kind of disturbing to see how eerily like dear old Dad I looked when I aged my own photo. And how much more handsome my wife looks like as a man, than me.

At some point, I even thought about writing an app review for FaceApp... but what the hell, it's pretty pointless. It doesn't do anything (for free, that is) that Snapchat already does better, except its interface is a whole lot less annoying than Snapchat's because you don't have a whole lot of other functionality to learn. I had fun with it... and one of the things I did was to play around with Thanos's face!






So, all that aside, there was some growing concern that FaceApp's servers were storing all the data that was being uploaded on them, despite their claims that data was being cleared. And that this contravenes privacy and all that jazz. It came to the point where FaceApp had to show this message whenever you start it up.


And I know they only recently added it because I was playing with FaceApp way before all this commotion began.

Facial Recognition

On that note, facial recognition has made some progress as a technology. Now some mobile phone cameras can detect the race, gender and approximate age of a person simply by scanning the user's face. That's some awesome shit, right? We can even use facial recognition to lock and unlock phones.

Wait. Uh-oh...

That means that deepfake technology could conceivably simulate your facial features enough to bypass any security measures you may have implemented using your facial features. That certainly throws a spanner in the works, yes?

To continue that train of thought, if FaceApp had records of your facial features, it could bypass any security setting depending on facial recognition. Now, that's pretty scary. Think of your face as a key, and FaceApp as a key duplication machine.

Nah, I'm just kidding. Mobile phones have come a long way from the days where they could be easily fooled by photographs. Honestly, if that were still an issue, the last thing you should lose any sleep over is FaceApp.

Should we be worried anyway?

Maybe. If you're paranoid about people knowing what you look like, and being tracked as to your whereabouts. Personally, I'm a nobody and not worth the effort, so I think I'm pretty safe.

But you know what? FaceApp doesn't have anything that you probably already have uploaded to Social Media. Yes, all your very best selfies on Facebook, Instagram, God knows what else. If you're not a Social Media user, yes, FaceApp might represent a threat. But to the world at large? Unbunch your underpants, children. FaceApp is the least of your worries. It's not the only app of its kind, and it's not even the best of its kind.

And considering you can upload not just your own face, but photos of other people, there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent others from uploading your face onto FaceApp. Worrying at this point seems like an exercise in futility.

The cool (and morbid) thing about all this is...

The photos of you that were uploaded, could be added to the data bank that helps train the learning algorithm to synthesize faces. Think about it - long after you're dead and gone, part of you is going to exist for ever and ever. In perpetuity. Not just in some moldering Facebook In Memorandium page, but in an app that people actually access frequently.

Probably not the kind of immortality most people wish for, but well, damn.