FaceApp—the AI-powered photo-morphing app that recently gone viral for its age filter but hit the headlines for its controversial privacy policy—has been found collecting the list of your Facebook friends for no reason.
The Russian-made FaceApp has been around since the spring of 2017 but taken social media by storm over the course of the past few weeks as millions of people downloaded the app to see how they would look when they are older or younger, or swap genders.
The app also contains a feature that allows users to download and edit photos from their Facebook accounts, which only works when a user enables FaceApp to access the social media account via the ‘Login with Facebook’ option.
As you can see in the screenshot above, besides requesting for access to your basic profile information and photos, FaceApp also fetches the list of your Facebook friends “who also use and have shared their friends’ lists with FaceApp.”
Have you yet asked yourself why this app asks for permission it unlikely need to perform its intended function?
FaceApp Unnecessarily Access Your Facebook Friends Lists
Indian security researcher Athul Jayaram recently contacted The Hacker News raising a huge red flag about the collection of users’ Facebook friend list data that FaceApp currently doesn’t use in any way to function itself or power any of its features.
“When an app asks for permissions that are unnecessary to its functioning, you should think twice before downloading it.”
We also tried to find if FaceApp in someway is using this data to “enhance the user experience,” but we failed to find one that justifies the collection of this particular data.
images from Hacker News
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