Faceapp the app everyone is using to make shockingly accurate old photos of themselves in the future has been all over social media in the last 48 hours.
In that time we have found out that the app was creatied by Russian developers, leading to the question, is it safe to use?
See the following from Forbes
No, FaceApp isn't taking photos of your face and taking them back to Russia for some nefarious project. At least that's what current evidence suggests.
After going viral in 2017, and amassing more than 80 million active users, it's blowing up again thanks to the so-called FaceApp Challenge where celebs (and everyone else) have been adding years to their visage with the app’s old age filter. The app uses artificial intelligence to create a rendering of what you might look like in a few decades on your iPhone or Android device.
But one tweet set of a minor internet panic this week, when a developer warned that the app could be taking all the photos from your phone and uploading them to its servers without any obvious permission from the user.
The tweeter, Joshua Nozzi, said later he was trying to raise a flag about FaceApp having access to all photos, even if it wasn't uploading them to a server owned by the Russian company.
A security researcher who goes by the pseudonym Elliot Alderson (real name Baptiste Robert) downloaded the app and checked where it was sending users' faces. The French cyber expert found FaceApp only took submitted photos - those that you want the software to transform - back up to a company server.
And where's that server based? America, not Russia. A cursory look at hosting records confirmed toForbesthat this was true, the servers for FaceApp.io were based in Amazon data centers in the U.S. And, as noted by Alderson, the app also uses third party code, and so will reach out to their servers, but again these are based in the U.S. and Australia.
So yes, it appears to be safe! You can read the whole article on Forbes, here.