Looks like the FBI designated FaceApp as a threat because of its crazy data policy and its Russian origin. Even though I think it's a really shady app, that's a pretty low bar.
Hosting in Russia is expensive and does not provide any advantages, such as dynamic routing that is crucial for world-wide app. Most developers use it to comply with Russian standards: you only need to store information about Russian users on Russian servers. In addition, currently in Russia there are no good alternatives for reliable cloud neural network inference.
But I can’t understand the negative media about the application, based on the founder’s country of origin. I argue that this is discrimination because there is as yet no evidence of breach of confidentiality.
It’s beyond dispute.
The Russian government has breached confidentiality.
The country intervening in most foreign elections is the United States with 81 interventions, followed by Russia (including the former Soviet Union) with 36 interventions from 1946 to 2000—an average of once in every nine competitive elections [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention
Yes, definitely, again another thing beyond dispute. Not sure what the point is you're trying to make though.
>Hosting in Russia is expensive and does not provide any advantages
Hosting in top .ru DCs like Selectel is vastly cheaper than on any AWS-likes. These are extremely different products though.
but from a counter intelligence standpoint that's finger painting bar
Australian government metadata requests was well over 300,000 last year, nearly 1000 requests a day all warrantless, can come from tiny local councils or horse racing orgs. Trust us, they say, there's oversight in hidden tribunals, they say.
The FBI isn't saying "normal people are at risk from FaceApp" but "US intelligence is at risk from the use of FaceApp". In the (very short) linked letter, it specifically calls out "elected officials, candidates, political campaigns, [and] political parties".
Considering all US intelligence agencies unanimously agree that Russia already attacked US candidates and political parties in the past, saying "yeah but everyone does it" is about as off-topic of a remark as you can get. To my knowledge the FBI has never publicly disclosed Australia's efforts to meddle in US elections.
I've seen this sort of "argument" a lot lately. Not sure why people think it communicates anything other than lazy cynicism.
That everyone (to a rounding error) has sex does not mean that everyone has sex with everyone.
Australians legally do metadata and spying better than everyone else on many metrics and then share it with the multiple eyes. Something to remember when the media is whipping up a threat frenzy. Given Australia's treatment of whistleblowers and slow descent into authoritarianism, I very much envy the few protections Americans take for granted.
Aren't all threats potential threats, until they are actual? I dunno, maybe the FBI has a formal delineation between potential threat, threat, and . . . whatever is after that. But I doubt it.