App Warnings and Banned Users (The Teardown)
FaceApp may be a counterintelligence threat, Tiktok doesn't follow our rules
The Teardown
Thursday :: December 5th, 2019
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Warnings About FaceApp
Despite whatever contempt we possess for selfie-stick connoisseurs, we love capturing ourselves on camera. Look around, and you’ll see us contorting our lips in front of busy airport escalators, posing to emphasize the right curves or muscles, and capturing perfectly worn ice at Lake Louise after moving all the other influencers out of the way. The popularization of the selfie cranked our photo curation addiction beyond its limits. Portrait mode may one day spontaneously combust an iPhone if the blur is just right.
Photos have rarely existed in the public sphere in their raw form. They’ve been massaged through creative processing techniques. Entire software ecosystems exist because of photo-processing software products like Photoshop. We often edit our photos to push them closer to what we think others want to see.
Selfies elevate photo manipulation because a face, the killer-app we sell to the world, must look pristine at all times. In an ideal world, its angles adhere to the golden ratio, but if not, we nudge it a bit on the left or the right to make it fit. Surrounding features should also look nice, but those can be cropped and trimmed and squeezed too.
Apps that help us promote our selfies often reach viral status, leading app-store download lists and producing celebrity selfies that are critically important to our national history. You’ve probably heard of some notable examples that I’ve either used or sampled:
Snapchat’s selfie-view masks
Bitmoji’s lookalike emojis (both before and after the Snap acquisition)
Instagram’s Stories (despite the blatant Snapchat rip-off)
Musica.ly, better known now as TikTok
FaceApp, an iOS and Android app that uses sophisticated algorithms to alter pictures of your face, surfed the virality wave earlier this year and hasn’t yet succumbed to receding interest. The app’s significant following is no surprise; many people want to experiment with low-touch face-bending technology. See below:
Hi. Fun, right? Horrific? Handsome? I need to sell this pristine 1995 Toyota Corolla to you today!
My point is this: FaceApp, like so many other apps and tools, is harmless at first glance, but mostly avoided the torrent of negative attention about its origins in Russia until now (from the WSJ opening):
The Federal Bureau of Investigation warned that certain Russian-made software, including the viral hit FaceApp, pose a potential counterintelligence threat and could put Americans’ private data at risk.
It’s not yet clear that the data is used maliciously or stored somewhere within reach of misaligned actors. FaceApp’s founder tried to highlight the details at a high level:
A man who has identified himself as FaceApp’s founder, Yaroslav Goncharov said in a statement Monday that his company doesn’t sell or share data with third parties, and that all user data collected is stored in cloud servers and not transferred to Russia.
The critical problem — a concern about many foreign-born apps — is users aren’t taking the time to investigate the terms and understand the data they willingly release. The apps and their parent businesses don’t go out of their way to transparently communicate this information either.
The broader problem — or not — is even simpler: people just don’t care about their privacy no matter how many WSJ or CNN privacy-check guides they read.
TikTok Bans Whatever It Wants
The most contemporary selfie-amplifier isn’t a pure face-first camera at all: it’s TikTok. It sits near or at the top of nearly every app download ranking over the last year due to an infectious cocktail of demographics (teens, mostly), dancing and comedy (fun), and among the most and least popular accounts, selfies. If you’re my age — 16th anniversary of my 21st birthday — you shouldn’t download it. If you really need to see what TikTok is all about, just look (safe-for-work) here.
TikTok recently came under fire for banning the account of a user who cleverly mixed an eyelash how-to with commentary about the ongoing oppression of Muslims in China. As a reminder, TikTok is owned by the China-based mega-unicorn Bytedance.
So, what’s the problem? Is it the ban? Is it the ownership? In an unexpected about-face, the problematic user was actually reinstated. Speaking pragmatically about what is possible, the ban isn’t worth thinking much about. Chinese companies are absolutely under the control of the government, which transitively sets the rules for TikTok’s U.S. app users despite any understanding otherwise.
Conversely, many folks in the U.S. — including prominent CEOs — believe private apps shouldn’t exercise nearly any control over their content. The right answer is, frankly, non-existent. Tech companies and their apps will continue to adhere to the specific rules of doing business in particular countries or avoid those countries altogether.
China's control over its businesses is fascinating, but what's also compelling to me is the trick those businesses play on users. At least one school of thought suggests the FaceApp algorithm that bends faces well into their seventies is also trained and tuned with each and every selfie. That's probably true. Training data sourced from the U.S. don't live in the U.S. Short of banning the app, there’s virtually nothing we can do about it.
TikTok provides Bytedance with imagery for facial recognition, but also signals of intent and interest collected through the app such as location, song choice, face presence, social connections between users, likes, and more.
Most importantly, TikTok won't stop anytime soon. Users mostly deal with removals and bans by rolling their eyes and posting again. Bytedance will continue to amass intelligence on today's users that might come back to haunt them in their later years.
Selfies are just too fun.