AI Photo Editor FaceApp Goes Viral Again on iOS, Raises Questions About Photo Library Access (techcrunch.com) 22
FaceApp, an app that applies filters to photos, is having another moment in the spotlight this week. An anonymous reader shares a report: The app has gone viral again after first doing so two years ago or so. The effect has gotten better but these apps, like many other one-off viral apps, tend to come and go in waves driven by influencer networks or paid promotion. We first covered this particular AI photo editor from a team of Russian developers about two years ago. It has gone viral again now due to some features that allow you to edit a person's face to make it appear older or younger. You may remember at one point it had an issue because it enabled what amounted to digital blackface by changing a person from one ethnicity to another. In this current wave of virality, some new questions are floating around about FaceApp. The first is whether it uploads your camera roll in the background. We found no evidence of this and neither did security researcher and Guardian App CEO Will Strafach or researcher Baptiste Robert. The second is how it allows you to pick photos without giving photo access to the app.
Make a person's face older or younger? (Score:2)
Bo-ring.
I want a photo app that anime-ize people. Bonus point if there's also a furry-ize option, with the obvious animals (cat,bunny and fox).
Summary hides simple answer (Score:5, Informative)
The answer to the second question (from the article) is that it does not in fact have access to photos without permission, instead what it can do is make use of a system dialog that lets the user choose a photo they want to send into the application.
So the app never has photo library access, it just can be sent a single image you explicitly choose to send to the app.
To me that mechanism (introduced in iOS11) is a great way for apps to be able to make use of a photo library without having to be given full access, and actually the devs should be applauded for being able to use that technique instead of just requiring whole library access as many other applications would do.
This is not an advertisement or anything, but... (Score:1)
...have y'all heard of FaceApp? It's this app that lets you change faces in photos: older, younger, black, white, etc... We're sure that there's no evidence of Russians using it for malicious means. I guess if you wanted, you could go here [slashdot.org] to find out more about it.
I can't stand advertising. I go out of my way to avoid it. I'm the person that stabs out the little speakers in gas pumps that spit out noise while you're trying to pump gas (you're welcome). And so now here I am, a slashdot user, being adv
Who cares? (Score:1)
What could possibly go wrong (Score:3)
It's not like it's a Russian application discretely funded by the former KGB to allow them access to your facial recognition data.
Oh.
Wait.