Noticed how your timeline and social media feed is flooded with photos of people suddenly looking aged? No, you aren’t stuck in a time warp. Posting ‘old person’ selfies on social media is the latest fun thing to do. Move over all those beauty missions and apps meant to flatter you into thinking slim, young and radiant. Celebs and influencers are posting these ‘old person’ selfies thanks to the FaceApp, a photo editing app developed by Russian company Wireless Lab.
What is FaceApp?
FaceApp is designed to create realistic transformations of faces using various filters and features, the first version of which was released in 2017. The free version offers a limited choice of filters including the one that is going viral right now. The feature that has tweeps going crazy for the app is the ‘old’ option where the app gives you three versions of your face — two young and one that looks really old and probable.
This app is no different from Snapchat with the baby-face and gender-swap filters and now Instagram’s many additional filters. The app is popular, obviously, because of the final outcome. Using a picture of any person, the filter throws back an image of them looking considerably older.
- Reports from Forbes and Wired have been circulating about Wireless Lab’s intentions. Much like the scary Cambridge Analytica scandal (in which a Facebook quiz acquired the personal data of millions of people), FaceApp now has the facial data of over 150 million people, according to install-analytics. So to keep your data as safe as possible, here are some pointers worth following:
- When downloading any new app , users get permission-dialogue boxes, requesting for access to media and document libraries, your camera and microphone. Read carefully and take a stance on what permissions you may or may not be granting. Some apps end up linking up with apps which are in turn linked with banking apps, so be mindful.
- One shouldn’t use social media accounts to link-up with any third-party apps. For example, if you use Facebook to log into an app such as FaceApp, they may be able to gain access to device details, or even behaviour patterns. Any data you voluntarily or involuntarily supply can then be used by the app (maliciously or otherwise) or sold as data.
FaceApp also shows users what their alternative genders or even races would look like. The app might have taken the Internet by storm only recently, but it has actually been around for a while and enjoying a brief resurgence on the back of its latest Artificial Intelligence neural network software.
Considering the photos one is seeing on social media, the accuracy is quite frightening. Some users, who’ve used FaceApp, are now scared of ageing at all! After all, that is the closest one can get to peeking into their future.
‘Old’ versions of Bollywood actors Varun Dhawan and Arjun Kapoor have garnered thousands of likes on Instagram, while Malayalam actor Hareesh Kanaran used his FaceApp post to pay a compliment to fellow actor Mammootty.
Hollywood has also participated actively, with Shazam! actor Zachary Levi jumping on board, joking he’ll look like Tom Hanks. And, of course, is it even 2019 if we leave out the never-aging Keanu Reeves? Tom Marks tweeted a regular photo of Keanu Reeves and captioned it, “Thanks, FaceApp for showing us what Keanu will look like at 90.” If all this seems too pretty perfect, check the memes which the meme makers are working on.
The best has to be the meme that shows Anil Kapoor’s ‘aged’ photo and says, “You really thought a filter could age him?”
