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Comment by Wissmania | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many people with a profile picture of their face on their Twitter/Facebook accounts are seriously concerned about this

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I wouldn't be surprised if this app collected much less data than the Facebook cancer. Facebook is not only stalking you through its main app but its other brands (Insta, WhatsApp, etc which a lot of people don't even know they're owned by FB) as well as unrelated third-party apps & websites that embed their malicious SDKs.

Facebook is an industrial-scale stalking operation. I doubt FaceApp (or frankly any government actor) could pull off something like that even if they wanted to.

The difference is which government the spyware corp is controlled by.

The face picture is not really the problem. The app slurps other data from the device, such as log files, cookies, identifiers, etc. Of course, this app is probably not dissimilar to many of the other 2.5 million Android, 1.8 million Apple, 0.7 million Windows, and 0.5 million Amazon apps. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-av...

Well Twitter and Facebook are American companies so it's obviously patriotic to give them your image and data.

(/s)

The photos are public too...

It's certainly better than giving your face to sketchy apps from Russia or China.

It's not better to have your face or other data in a database within reach of your own government. Your government has power over you, other governments do not.

The FBI very specifically is concerned about public/elected officials. You don't think other governments might be interested in data about elected officials?

Other governments absolutely have power over you, just not always legally.

Or anywhere nearly as easily, to be fair.

I need a passport and driver license

That one piece of paper doesn't say you do, but, I digress.

If it's in your public Facebook profile (or any other public profile), you've already given it to Russia and China.

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