A slap in the FaceApp

Another day, another social media challenge with some murky consequences. If you're one of the millions of people who recently downloaded FaceApp to show the world what you will look like when you're old and gray: You may have unintentionally given access to your likeness to malicious actors...to do whatever they want with that content...for life!

What is FaceApp?

Faceapp first blew up in 2017, when it was downloaded 80 million times, and is now experiencing a renewal in recent weeks. The app uses neural networks to simulate what you will look like as you age. Sounds like fun, who wouldn't want to see what they would look like at 80, better yet, what our favorite celebrities would look like.

The problem seems to be when you upload your selfie to the app, you are giving them your face and data to a company who could use it for potentially nefarious purposes.

The expansive Terms of Service for Wireless Labs, the company behind FaceApp, raise some concerns. Section 5 of the Terms "grants FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you."

This type of Terms of Service aren't necessarily new, as Facebook and Instagram have similar verbage, although FaceApp's Terms are particularly vague.

Marc Boudria, VP or Technology for AI company giant Hypergiant says "There is the very real possibility that applications like these are simply honeypots designed to get you to give up information about yourself. You just sent them closeup, well-lit images of your face, now they know your name and vital details and can create an annotated image record of you as a human. The next model would have no problem triangulating and verifying and adding more data from other sources like LinkedIn which would then give them your education, your work history, skies the limit."

What can I do?
Don't take an apathetic approach to personal security. We know it's easy to breeze past privacy policies, but the sooner you start asking questions and paying attention, the sooner you can begin to safeguard your data. We don't know what someone will do with your data, but if it results in Identity Theft, Baker Insurance can help.

Home, Tenant, Condo and other policies written with Erie Insurance have an available Identity Recovery and Fraud Reimbursement feature to them. A part of this feature is Erie will provide the Case Management Service, which in many cases the hardest part is knowing where to start. With this feature, you can start and rely on Erie to help navigate the process.

Ask Baker Insurance about this feature to your policy.

For more information on identity theft, visit https://www.identitytheft.gov/www.identitytheft.gov/