Red Scare: Democrats Warn FaceApp Could Be a Russian Trojan Horse

FaceApp shot to the top of Apple’s app store this week as the likes of Mindy Kaling, Russell Wilson, and Drake posted photos of themselves, artificially-aged, to social media. But the app has also attracted scrutiny from those who’ve noted its country of origin and are concerned about privacy—including from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who called for a federal investigation into the St. Petersburg-based FaceApp Wednesday. “Given the growing popularity of FaceApp and these national security and privacy concerns, I ask that the FBI assess whether the personal data uploaded by millions of Americans onto FaceApp may be finding its way into the hands of the Russian government, or entities with ties to the Russian government,” Schumer wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons. “Furthermore, I ask that the FTC consider whether there are adequate safeguards in place to prevent the privacy of Americans using this application, including government personnel and military service members, from being compromised.”

Schumer also asked Simons to potentially take steps to ensure that Americans be “made aware of the risks associated with the use of this application and others similar to it.” Perhaps sensing that some presidential hopefuls might join the craze to endear themselves to voters, the Democratic National Committee released its own warning this week instructing the 2020 presidential candidates to refrain from using the app for fear it could leave them vulnerable to a data breach like the one that damaged Hillary Clinton in 2016. “Ultimately, this novelty is not without risk,” DNC chief security officer Bob Lord told the 2020 candidates, per CNN. “FaceApp was developed by Russians.”

FaceApp denied funneling Americans’ data to the Kremlin, saying in a statement to TechCrunch that the app does not “sell or share any user data with any third parties,” and that said data is “not transferred to Russia.” Still, the DNC, which has beefed up its security since 2016, is urging caution. “It’s not clear at this point what the privacy risks are, but what is clear is that the benefits of avoiding the app outweigh the risks,” Lord said. The app’s terms of service, which grant it “perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable licence” to uploaded photos, has also raised some eyebrows in the tech sector.

Lord and Schumer are right to be concerned, particularly in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the Donald Trump-linked consulting firm mined data from millions of Facebook users through a third-party quiz app, using it to better target voters with political messaging and ads. That episode brought Facebook’s mishandling of user privacy to the forefront, and upped the ante for other social-media companies that use data in a similar way. While FaceApp has attempted to allay concerns about how it handles user data, privacy experts remain skeptical—not to mention surprised that so many Americans jumped on the FaceApp bandwagon without considering the consequences. “My impression of it honestly was shock that so many people were, in this climate, so willing to upload their picture to a seemingly unknown server without really understanding what that data would go to feed,” the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project’s Liz O’Sullivan told NPR, noting that it’s not just Russia users need to worry about. “For all we know, there could be a military application, there could be a police application.”

— How Paul Manafort tricked Donald Trump into making Mike Pence his V.P.

Source: Vanityfair.com

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