As the viral artificial aging app FaceApp has garnered headlines, privacy warnings and even calls for federal investigations this week, it raises the question of why a simple aging app is reviving such fervent interest in our digital privacy and whether this newfound interest represents a brief burst that will quickly fizzle out or the start of an extended era of privacy interest. In an era in which we seem utterly resigned to the complete loss of digital privacy and freely accept major social media platforms and data brokers doing what they please with our data, why is a simple entertainment app generating such a backlash?
At first glance, FaceApp’s app is little different than the myriad other entertainment apps available with a mouse click from the major app stores. Hand it a photo and get back an artificially aged version that shows how the person in the image might look in the future. The app can also perform many other kinds of modifications.
Users are not limited to uploading their own images, they can upload any image, meaning even users who have never heard of that app can find artificially aged versions of their faces shared on social media.
In fact, a cursory scroll through public images people have shared on social media from the app suggests many images are merely public images downloaded from the Web or publicly accessible social media profile images, meaning the imagery seen by the app seems to err more towards preexisting public imagery rather than a secret trove of private imagery.
While the app dates back to 2017, it seems to have attracted newfound media coverage again this past Monday, with coverage really surging yesterday afternoon.
Why is the app attracting so much attention? It seems the bulk of coverage of the app has focused on two issues: its Russian developers and its terms of service that appear to grant it rights to the content that users upload.
While its primary developers may be based in Russia, the company has emphasized that its service makes use of industry standard Amazon and Google cloud services like nearly ever other popular mobile app. Rather than transmitting users’ photographs to shadowy Kremlin data centers for use by secretive intelligence agencies, as one might be forgiven for believing from all of the breathless media and social media coverage of the app, it appears its backend infrastructure is no different from any other popular app.
Its terms of service are also little different from almost any other modern app or Website, including the major social platforms themselves. The rights the company requests of its users are modern boilerplate demands found in almost every terms of service agreement today. Far from some shadowy demands unique to FaceApp, the language in the agreement could have been pulled almost verbatim from Facebook’s terms of service.
At least FaceApp isn't granting itself the right to access your microphone, photo galleries and everything else it wants like certain other companies.
Interestingly, all of the attention being paid to FaceApp’s privacy terms does not seem to have led to a broader conversation about online privacy. There does not appear to be any massive surge in global coverage of the privacy considerations of other sites, nor any systematic rehash of Cambridge Analytica or the broader surveillance state.
In fact, all of the discussion about FaceApp seems to be focused narrowly on the app itself, rather than seeding a broader societal conversation about digital privacy, as might be expected if there was legitimate public interest in the privacy dimension of FaceApp.
Instead, a closer look at how the media has been covering the FaceApp story offers an important clue to why it seems to have garnered so much attention.
The graph below shows the percentage of worldwide online media coverage in the 65 languages monitored by the open data GDELT Project that mentioned FaceApp, along with coverage that mentioned it alongside “privacy” or alongside “Russia” or “Russian” or “Moscow.”
Immediately clear is that much of the coverage of the app in the past 24 hours has emphasized privacy considerations. Yet perhaps most tellingly, there is more coverage mentioning the app’s Russian developers than there is discussing privacy. In short, we seem more interested in the fact that it is a Russian app than anything to do with how it might be using our data.
The timeline below shows the same data as above, but presents it as the percentage of all FaceApp coverage that also mentioned privacy and the percentage of all FaceApp coverage that also mentioned Russia.
Here it can be seen that more than 80% of its coverage thus far today has mentioned its Russian connection, while only 60-70% has mentioned privacy.
Russia is clearly more interesting to the media than privacy.
In fact, according to Google Trends, users in the US have searched about the Russian nationality of FaceApp’s developers 1.7 times as much as they’ve searched about its privacy terms.
Putting this all together, it seems the real reason FaceApp has attracted so much attention to its privacy practices over the past 24 hours has nothing to do with some newfound renaissance in public interest in privacy, but rather because the app has become a lightning rod for all things to do with Russia in a political environment in which the words “Russia” and “Internet” still conjure up images of Russian governmental election interference.
It is certainly possible that a Russian company could find itself under court order from Russian intelligence to provide access to uploaded images, but this is no different than the countless American companies that have found themselves under similar court order on behalf of American intelligence agencies to compromise global communications, as detailed in the Snowden revelations. It is also possible that any mobile app could eventually yield improved facial algorithms that could have dual purposes. However, the fact that so much of the imagery users have shared from using the app seems to be publicly available imagery, it remains to be seen just how much novel imagery has actually been processed using the application.
Perhaps the biggest lesson of all is just how much Russia has become the new American bogeyman just as it was a generation ago. It seems anything with the word “Russia” attached, even if it is merely a popular mobile app written by a company that happens to be based in Russia, instantly becomes the personification of all our American fears.
Had FaceApp been written by developers in London or Paris or Madrid or Silicon Valley, it is unlikely anyone would ever have thought to look at its terms of service. They certainly don’t when it comes to the social media platforms they are using to discuss FaceApp. Even if they had, the fact that the conversation about FaceApp has not led to broader concern about the myriad other facial modification apps used everyday reminds us that we don't actually care about privacy.
In the end, the fact that we seem more interested in the app’s Russian heritage than we do in its privacy considerations reminds us that this was never about privacy. It was about Russia.
