An app that lets users see what they might
look like in 50 years went viral last week, said
Chip Brownlee in Slate.com— entertaining
users while building up a database of millions
of faces. FaceApp takes your selfie and runs
it through a digital time machine— whitening
your hair, deepening your wrinkles—all for a
good, perhaps horrified, laugh. But worries
about the app’s creator, Russia-based Wireless
Lab, sparked questions about whether those
“funny aged photos (and maybe the origi-
nals, too) were being sent across the cloud to
servers in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
backyard—for who knows what.” A trove of
such images can have commercial benefits for
anyone working with facial recognition tech-
nology, and potentially nefarious opportunities
for so-called deepfakes. FaceApp’s CEO said
data is only being stored on U.S. and Australian servers, but the
app’s link to Russia even prompted the Democratic National
Committee to warn presidential campaigns to delete it.Did you read the privacy policy for this thing? asked Ry Crist
in CNET.com. Probably not, so I’ll summarize: You’re grant-
ing FaceApp “perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free,
worldwide” license to do whatever it wants with your content.
Given what we know about how “deepfake technology can be
used to create stunningly realistic video” with just a single imageof a face, consider this a warning. “We say
we don’t want to be snooped on,” and then
we smile for the camera, said Molly Roberts
in The Washington Post. Your weather app
“might not only tell data brokers where
you’ve been and when, but it also might
have tapped into your camera.” That it took
fears about FaceApp’s Russian ownership to
“give us pause before opening our lives to a
random app” says a lot about our willfully
ignorant attitude toward tech.“Think FaceApp is scary? Wait till you hear
about Facebook,” said Brian Barrett in
Wired. The social media giant regularly “ap-
plies facial recognition to photos that users
upload to its servers,” yet it still has 2.5 bil-
lion active users. FaceApp is worrisome,
but it’s no worse than “any other app you let into your photo
library.” The FaceApp controversy is probably overblown, said
Charlie Warzel in The New York Times, but that doesn’t mean
it was pointless. “No, it’s probably not a Russian intelligence
operation” intended to build deepfake videos. But it’s useful to
stop “to think about the companies behind the apps we down-
load.” The real message of this scandal is not that FaceApp is an
outlier but that demanding as much data as possible from users
is an “industry standard.” And finally we are heading toward a
“much-needed reckoning.”FaceApp: A Russian app incites a data panic
Newsco
m^
(^2 )5G is not ready for prime time
I tested 5G wireless service in several cities
across America, and it’s not ready for you,
said Joanna Stern in The Wall Street Journal.
I’ll admit I was amazed “the first time I saw
a speed test hit 1,800 megabits per second
on Verizon’s network in downtown Denver,”
which is 52 times the average 4G download
speed. But I noticed a difference only when
downloading something; “emailing, web
browsing, Instagramming, streaming video—
none of that felt any different.” Verizon,
T-Mobile, and AT&T are deploying their high-
frequency waves in just small pockets of a few
cities—and I could get the signal only when
I was outdoors. As soon as I stepped inside,
“the 5G signal vanished.” In Atlanta, it was
90 degrees when I visited, and oddly my phone
could run just one or two download tests be-
fore it would overheat and switch to 4G.Google Glass for autistic kids
Remember Google Glass? The computerized
glasses unveiled in 2013 never lived up to the
hype as a consumer product, said Cade Metz
in The New York Times, but it is now getting
an “afterlife as a device to teach autistic chil-
dren.” A clinical trial from Stanford University,
conducted over two years with 71 children,revealed that the “children who used the soft-
ware in their homes showed a significant gain
on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales,
a standard tool for tracking the behavior of
those on the autism spectrum.” The glasses
let a child look at a family member making
faces—happy, sad, surprised, angry, bored—
and try to identify the emotion. The glasses can
help him make sure he is looking directly at a
face and can tell him if he is right or wrong.Microsoft’s voting security push
Microsoft is rolling out free software designed
to improve the security of voting machines,
said Ken Dilanian in NBCNews.com. The
open-source software, called ElectionGuard,
uses “an encrypted tracking code to allow a
voter to verify that his or her vote has been
recorded and not tampered with.” Microsoft
hopes to have it in wide use by 2020. Security
experts have grown increasingly concerned
that anachronistic voting systems are being
left vulnerable to hackers. Microsoft had al-
ready launched a free cybersecurity program,
AccountGuard, to be used by political cam-
paigns to detect attacks. Since September, “the
company said, it has made 781 notifications
of nation-state attacks targeting organizations
participating in AccountGuard.”Bytes: What’s new in tech
A company
formed by
Elon Musk
is devel-
oping an
implantable
device that
links your
brain to a
smartphone,
said Antonio Regalado in the MIT
Technology Review. The system,
Neuralink, “will employ dozens of
thin wires to collect signals in the
brain,” eventually connecting those
wires to a “thought transmitter that
tucks behind your ear like a hearing
aid” and connects to a computer or
smartphone via Bluetooth. While
scientists have tested brain implants
on humans, allowing paralyzed
patients to move computer cursors
or robotic arms, Neuralink wants to
make the technology more practi-
cal. Paralyzed volunteers could
begin testing the device by the end
of 2020; in the “craziest and most
controversial” part of the project,
Musk has said he wants “a telepa-
thy device for healthy people inside
of a decade.”Innovation of the week
20 NEWS Technology
The artificial-aging app in action