Posted on by emmyrinehart

Chinese “Deepfake” App Reignites Fear of Losing Our Privacy Online

Last Friday, a new app was added to China’s app store called Zao. This app would allow users to create their own deepfakes. In simple terms, it allowed people to put their own face on celebritys’ faces from feature films.

By Sunday, it became the most downloaded free app on the app store, but then information surfaced that something unsettling lurked in the terms and conditions.

There were claims that the original verbiage in the terms and conditions on the app stated that users who supplied their photo in the app would give up intellectual property rights to their own faces, and Zao could use their images for marketing purposes.

This has raised concerns about privacy online and what we’re agreeing to in those pages upon pages of terms and conditions for our favorite apps.

Zao has since updated its terms and conditions to further protect user privacy saying that they won’t use pictures or videos uploaded by users for anything other than to help improve the app. It also promised to delete any content from its servers that was uploaded but then removed by its users. However, some Twitter users don’t believe that they are keeping their promises.

After the scare in the U.S. with a similar app called FaceApp, privacy concerns were also voiced, but no evidences of ill-intentions were found.

Privacy is a topic that we see popping up in the media more and more as time goes on, and rightfully so. With new algorithms being developed to use any information we give it in ways that we don’t always understand, it induces a lot of fear because, the truth is, most of us don’t know what information we’re really giving up and what it’s being used for.

This has led to public distrust of the internet, with a global survey showing that 25% of survey takers didn’t trust the internet. This poses challenges not only for these companies, but also for society as a whole as trust in the internet is crucial to trust in the government, our healthcare providers, and our media as more information is moved to online platforms.