Privacy policy

A new viral challenge has spread to Pakistan in which you use FaceApp to alter your appearance. It is trending on Twitter and everyone is sharing their photos. FaceApp allows you to age your face using an editing tool so that you can see how you will look when you grow old and how you looked when you were younger. You can also alter other things about yourself. However, it has recently been found out that this app gives the owner permission to save your face and any information you give them forever. Whenever you’re thinking about installing a viral app like FaceApp, privacy should be a concern.

These apps are fun, but by installing them you’re usually agreeing to give a third party some degree of information about you in exchange for that fun. Allowing an app to take, analyze and mess with photos of your face and then keep any information it gathers forever should be concerning. According to their policy, FaceApp tracks and collects quite a lot of information about you from your phone when you use the app, both for the purposes of ‘improving their services’ and to show you lots of ads. By agreeing to the app’s terms of service, users grant its creators ‘perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide’ ownership of images used in the app and the freedom to ‘use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish [and] translate’ them however they see fit. Recent incidents in which major social media sites and apps either failed to protect or deliberately gave away mass stores of personal data, should have taught consumers to be more careful about who they trust with their online lives. Please take care to keep safe and consider if your privacy can be outweighed by the chance to take silly pictures.

Meer Rahim

Dadu