If you’ve been on social media at all over the last few days, you’ve probably noticed your friends, family and even celebrities posting pictures of themselves aged dozens of years using an app called FaceApp.
However, there are new warnings about what might be happening to those pictures you’re allowing the app to access and how they might be used in the future.
Techcrunch reports that the company, a Russian startup, is uploading users’ photos to the cloud, rather than making those crazy image transformations directly on your device.
“FaceApp goes on to specify that it ‘might’ store the photos users have chosen to upload in the cloud for a short period, claiming this is done for ‘performance and traffic’ — such as to make sure that a user doesn’t repeatedly upload the same photo to carry out another edit,” Techcrunch says.
That doesn’t sound too reassuring to us.
If you’ve downloaded and used FaceApp, here’s how to remove your pictures from their storage
If you’ve given FaceApp permission to access your photos and you’re concerned about how they could be used, the company has outlined how to request that your pictures be deleted:
- Open the app on your device
- Click ‘Settings’
- Click ‘Support’
- Click ‘Report a bug’
- In the subject line of the report, write: privacy
- Submit it
As always, be careful about the apps that you download — and especially with the data you share with them!
