![]() But every piece of info you share ends up in the horrible ad-tech ecosystem, with inferences drawn that would shock you." I don't know what they are doing with non-picture data. "The app probably has an ongoing way of feeding information about you back to its owner, so I would delete it immediately," Sullivan said. For registered users who share their results within the Services that provide special social network features, the shared content will be stored on the servers and shown within the Services unless a user either removes the images themselves or requests such a removal by contacting our support team." Permissions and pet photosīut what if you've already used the app? And are you safe if you don't use photos of your own face, but, say, of your cat or horse? The policy goes on to say, "For non-registered users and users who don't share their results within the Services, the original photos and results are automatically removed from our servers by two weeks after the last interaction. We use Secure Socket Layer technology to protect the privacy and integrity of the transmission process." The company representative pointed me to their privacy policy, which states, "The photos are sent to the servers through the encrypted connection. "You have no way of knowing where these images of you might end up in the future," Sullivan said. "I really think people are crazy to use this app or anything like it," Sullivan said.Īrtificial intelligence researchers, he says, are "desperate" to acquire large datasets they can feed into a computer to perfect their algorithm. Russia aside, is it smart to hand over a photograph of yourself to an app you know little about? The urban-legends site wrote an article after the Daily Mail story was published in which it concluded NewProfilePic is not especially invasive, noting that, "the claim that this app is stealing data for the Kremlin is also unsupported by evidence." He praised the research done by, however. And a few years ago when we first got viral in Bangladesh and India, there was another 'story'. 1 in Ukraine, when people were using it to create patriotic avatars with a beautiful effect we created, some Facebook started a similar story. "Recently when our other app, Photo Lab, was No. "I haven't been completely surprised ," he said. Sazhin told me via email that he felt the Daily Mail story hyped up anti-Russia hysteria. In that Instagram post, company founder Victor Sazhin says he was born in Moscow, moved to Ukraine as a child, and is against the war launched by Russia against Ukraine. "That's why we want to share the position on this issue on our founder's Instagram." "We understand that due to the current events in Ukraine, any connection to Russia could raise suspicions," the representative said. ![]() He does not live in the Russian Federation now." It is the former Moscow address of the founder of the company. It is the truth that the domain was registered to the Moscow address. "All user photos are hosted and processed on the Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure servers, which are located outside the Russian Federation. "We are a company with development offices in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus," a representative for PhotoLab, the company behind the app, told me. Given the war in Ukraine and the history of hackers working in Russia, just the mention of Russia's capital sets off suspicions for some would-be app users.īut the company isn't located in Moscow, though it does have an office in Russia. It turns out the NewProfilePic domain was originally registered in Moscow. ![]() Once the app became popular, people began digging into the company's history. The Daily Mail quotes a security expert who says "this app is likely a way of capturing people's faces in high resolution and I would question any app wanting this amount of data, especially one which is largely unheard of." Wait, what's the Russia connection? On Wednesday, the UK tabloid The Daily Mail published a story with the unnerving headline, "Is Russia after YOUR personal data? Experts warn internet users not to download latest online craze New Profile Pic that hoovers up your details." ("Hoovers" as in "vacuums," for those not up on British slang.) People on various social platforms are having fun tinkering not only with their own photos, but images of famous people and pets. It does pretty much what it says - makes your profile image look like a painting, using artificial intelligence. NewProfilePic is an app you can get for iOS or Android. ![]() And while the new images may look glamorous, using the app may be a bad idea - but perhaps not for the reason some say. They're likely using a free app called NewProfilePic Picture Editor, the latest social media craze. Maybe you've seen some of your Facebook friends upgrading their profile pictures to look like fancy illustrations of themselves.
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