“I’m quite happy, to be honest, because people are starting to be interested by this kind of question,” Mr. Robert said, “and they start to understand that, O.K., maybe there are some privacy concerns.”
Still, he noted, such concerns often take a back seat to novelty. “The cool factor is working a lot,” he said.
Mr. Robert and two other researchers who investigated the issue all said they had found no evidence on Apple or Android phones that FaceApp was secretly uploading entire photo galleries. But each voiced concern that the app, like many others, failed to alert users that their data was being uploaded to remote servers.
“If they don’t take privacy seriously, how seriously do they take security?” asked Will Strafach, the founder and chief executive of Guardian Firewall, a tool coming soon for iOS that aims to give users more control over their data. “If they don’t take security seriously, what’s the risk of either an insider threat or their company being breached?”
Others online raised concerns about FaceApp’s privacy policy and terms and conditions, citing, among other things, a clause that grants FaceApp extensive rights to user photographs. But Jeremy Gillula, tech projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties group, said it was similar to those of other apps.
“We always have concerns,” he said. “The fact that a lot of apps and services usually contain this catchall clause that says you grant us worldwide license to reproduce, modify, adapt, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your user content always seems a little over the top to me.”