The Armstrong and Getty Show. So we've posted pictures of what we'd look like if we were old. We didn't alter Joe and I, but everybody else. I kind of liked my look. I I look like a colorful old coat. It's called the face app, and you can you can pretty easy to take a picture and then you turn in yourself into what you look like old. And people were really digging it. For the last week that it's
been out at swept the nation and went viral. We've posted pictures of us at Armstrong and Getty dot com. But danger the Russians are behind it exactly in the d n C among others have warned their people do not use this app. Jeffrey Fowler joins us. Jeffrey is the technology columnist for the Washington Post. He's based in Beautiful Crime written San Francisco. To continue the theme of the show. But anyway, Jeffrey, what's the deal with this app? It is, uh, the latest version of the Red Peril.
Everyone is thinking, oh, I was just you know, playing along in now the latest viral craze. But now people are worried. Gosh if I handed over my face to
the Russian government, UM. So I spent yesterday kind of digging into this app, looking what data it was collecting as sending up behind the scenes, and then I even contacted the CEO of the company that makes it UM And I gotta say, I think we should be worried about this app, but not any more than we should be worried about a lot of other apps that we've
got on our phone. Yeah, and we've talked about this, uh many times, talked about it with you on how an app I almost downloaded once that was a bunch of fun emojis with pug faces on it. I became aware in the agreement that part of the agreement was if I download this pug emoji app, it gets access to every key stroke I've ever made on my phone, which I didn't even know that was possible. That scares
me more than the Russians having my picture. So, Yeah, there's lots of apps out there you should be worried about. There are, and part of the challenges. Look, it's a really good thing that here in America we're now having a conversation about data and privacy and whether we should be trusting certain apps. I've been hammering on this thing for a decade now, and no one's are listening to me. But I find the people are listening, so that's a
good thing. But the problem is it's really hard for us to get the information that we need to make smart choices when we're downloading something like this. If you go to the Space app paid on the Apple iOS App Store or the Google Play Store, you can't really get answers to some really basic questions like what is this thing doing, what are they doing to my face? Who are they're sharing it with, how long are they holding onto it? So we have kind of a fundamental problem.
And I think this this current scare over this app really kind of reflects that I had a banking app Bank that I really like that I couldn't figure out why my location device kept turning on because I leave mine off on my phone all the time because I don't want location attached to my pictures and all that sort of stuff. But something with this banking app turned on your location location of ice and I I got rid of it and complained to the bank and they
got rid of it. But there's so many apps, the new stuff that that's that's creepy totally that we should probably talk about what face app is and isn't doing, or at least what we can see, and then also what it's CEO says it is and isn't doing. And then the question is do we trust that ceo? Um, But what it is doing is whenever you take a photo with the app, or you you know, pick a photo out of your your photo collection, of your camera roll,
it's sending that photo to face app servers to be processed. Um. It has access to your whole camera roll, but it isn't taking the whole camera roll and uploading it. That was one of the first means. I'm not Jeffrey Epstein, So you get pictures from my phone. I'm not really that worried about it, And what are you gonna do with them? I have some tasteful notes I'm proud of.
So the next thing then is so they've got a photo, so they they've got this really terrible privacy policy for this thing, and a lot of apps that for the terrible privacy policies, and it sort of suggests that they're going to hold on to it forever. The CEO of the company says that told me that they actually delete most of them within forty eight hours because like they don't want to pay the story either. Your your mug
is not not worth holding onto. Well, we're about out of time, So what would your headline be though that all apps are dangerous? This one is no worse than others, well, actually no better than others almost all. A lot of the other ones that are similar. I think that's exactly right. There's you know, the Russians, my own this one, but there's also a lot of popular one of the Chinese. Ooh, like TikTok. That's a good thing to know. Jeffrey Jeffrey Fowler,
technology columnist for The Washington Post. Jeffrey, in ten seconds, how good a screening organization is, say Apple's app store or the big Google app store? How good are they keeping us safe? I would give them a C minus both C minus. Okay, so they're not useless, but it's better than not trying at all. Jeffrey Fowler, Jeffrey, we always enjoy the chance to chat. Thanks for taking a couple of minutes, and we have a link to your fabulous piece in the Post and Armstrong and getty dot com.
Thanks man, You bet