Perspective: SurveillanceFaceApp Makes Today’s Privacy Laws Look Antiquated
Cameras are everywhere, and data brokers are vacuuming up information on individuals. But regulations have not kept pace. You should stop using FaceApp, because there are few controls on how your data, including your face data, will be used. But the problems that FaceApp poses aren’t unique. Walking around anywhere can get your face included in facial-recognition databases. How that information can be mined, manipulated, bought, or sold is minimally regulated—in the United States and elsewhere.
Americans give billions of dollars a year to industries that promise to make them look younger. FaceApp became wildly popular, seemingly overnight, for doing the exact opposite. Applying a filter powered by artificial intelligence, the photo-editing app modifies photos of its users’ faces to show them what they might look like when they’re much older. The resulting images aren’t the only thing about FaceApp that strikes some people as creepy. FaceApp is the handiwork of a relatively unknown company in Russia—a provenance that, amid evidence of election interference and other misdeeds by Russian hackers, has raised widespread concerns in Washington. The Democratic National Committee and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are now calling out the app as a privacy threat.
Which it is. Tiffany C. Li writes in The Atlantic that, yes, you should stop using FaceApp, because there are few controls on how your data, including your face data, will be used. But the problems that FaceApp poses aren’t unique. Walking around anywhere can get your face included in facial-recognition databases. How that information can be mined, manipulated, bought, or sold is minimally regulated—in the United States and elsewhere. Militaries, law-enforcement agencies, and commercial interests alike envision far-reaching uses of AI and facial recognition, but legal and regulatory controls lag far behind the pace of technology.
For most people, never going outside is not an option. So laws in the United States and elsewhere need to be tuned up quickly—and not just because of FaceApp.
