Your Faceapp Photos Are Being Collected By Russians

Jul 18, 2019

by Bob Cesca

Donald Trump’s series of endlessly racist attacks against members of Congress is just the latest episode in the decades-long history of Trump’s instinctive disgust with anyone whose skin isn’t his shade of Oompa Loompa. Let there be no doubt: Trump is racist against non-white people, be they Latino, African, or miscellaneous and he’s not afraid to say it out loud in ways that never occurred to old-school Southern Strategists like Lee Atwater and Pat Buchanan. And a racist president can’t be allowed to govern, knowing his irrational bias against nearly one-fourth of American citizens.

One of the reasons we’re in this mess with an overtly racist president is directly due to the exploitation of our appetite for social media, that according to many sources including the Mueller Report. Facebook, Twitter and other platforms were carpet-bombed with agitprop designed to stir up viral animosity against Hillary Clinton. Through these platforms, American voters were directly targeted by firms like Cambridge Analytica, as well as the Russian Internet Research Agency, based on data we voluntarily provided, and which was both legally and illegally gathered and processed to help Trump and hurt the Democrats.

Cutting to the chase, that Faceapp thing everyone’s downloading to see what they’ll look like when they’re old? We’re doing it again. As if our profiles and personal details aren’t ripe enough for the taking by the crooks at Facebook, we continue to make ourselves vulnerable to foreign interference as well as identity theft by voluntarily submitting to these online toys.

It turns out, Faceapp is manufactured by Wireless Lab, a company based in St. Petersburg -- not St. Petersburg, Florida -- St. Petersburg, Russia. You know, the same city where the Mueller-indicted Internet Research Agency is based. That ought to be enough to keep this crapola far, far away from our phones and our personal data, but there’s more. The Washington Post observed:

The app uploads people’s photos to the “cloud” of servers run by Amazon and Google, the company said, meaning deleting the app would likely make no difference on how the photos are used. In its privacy terms, the company said it can collect any of a user’s uploaded photos as well as data on the user’s visited websites and other information.
The app’s terms of service says users grant the company a “perpetual, irrevocable ... (and) worldwide” license to use a user’s photos, name or likeness in practically any way they see fit.
If a user deletes content from the app, FaceApp can still store and use it, the terms say. FaceApp also says it can’t guarantee your data or information is secure, and that the company can share user information with other companies and third-party advertisers, which aren’t disclosed in the privacy terms.

But at least we can see what happens when decrepitude sets in. Seems worth it.

Frankly, I don’t care whether you’ve used this app already. But it was just a few months ago when we were outraged to learn this:

Last March, it emerged that a developer working on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, a controversial data firm that went on to work for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, had collected data on tens of millions of American Facebook users without their explicit knowledge. The developer had used an online quiz app that connected to Facebook to gather the data.

Yet we continue to play the quizzes and we continue to pump our faces into these apps, some of which might be on-the-level, though it’s safe to assume, however, that our data is being weaponized against us. We’re just handing it over. And when we’re not handing it over, it’s being stolen by Facebook.

ZDNet’s Ed Bott tweeted this question on Wednesday: “What if the Internet Research Agency in Russia is collecting all those FaceApp pictures to use for avatars on troll accounts for the 2020 election?” I don’t think any of us are in a position to brush off the possibility.

The Russians, and surely an entire roster of copycats, have discovered a way to undermine our democratic process by merely injecting targeted messages into our social media, knowing that our cultural obsession with augmenting our personal branding and building our audiences leaves us vulnerable to manipulation.

Given the existential crisis we’re confronting, with the president leading his disciples in chants of “send them back” Wednesday night, referring to deporting members of Congress who were mean to him, it’s critical that we do our part to self-regulate how we use social media. Stop sharing unsourced news. Stop sharing dubious memes. Stop handing over your personal information to disreputable Russian firms. Stop making it easier for our enemies to dictate who controls our government. It doesn’t have to be this way. Before we take back the White House, we have no choice but to take back our digital footprints. Don’t let history repeat itself.

NOTE: This is your only free article of the week. Subscribers get full access to premium posts four times a week, can read our archive, and get our weekly review “The Banter Brief” delivered to their inbox.

Read the latest for Banter Subscribers and get a 20% discount today!

Get 20% Off a Banter Membership!