Once again history repeats itself, but this time the trick is even more striking. Surely you will remember the application Faceapp, a tool that allowed you to become an 80-year-old man or a tadpole dependent on a bottle, well, all that is outdated, because now what is worn in China is ZAO, an application of deepfakes that will allow you to replace famous faces with your own with astonishing ease. The problem? You privacy.
ZAO and the deepfakes
As it happened with Faceapp, which ended up being accused of treating user data in a suspicious way, ZAO It has not taken long to fall into similar accusations by users. The app has risen to the number 1 download spot in China in the same way that FaceApp did. Only one video on Twitter was enough for the function to become popular, and the demonstration is worth seeing.
Allan Xia published the results of his tests. A 30-second video in which you can see how his face stars in the most iconic scenes of Leonardo DiCaprio's career. The results are spectacular, but they are even more so when we read that only a photograph and 8 seconds of waiting time.
In case you haven't heard, #ZAO is a Chinese app which completely blew up since Friday. Best application of 'Deepfake'-style AI facial replacement I've ever seen.
Here's an example of me as DiCaprio (generated in under 8 secs from that one photo in the thumbnail) ? pic.twitter.com/1RpnJJ3wgT
—Allan Xia (@AllanXia) 1th September 2019
You can only use videos proposed by the application itself (since they are the ones that have been previously analyzed by the algorithm to guarantee the results), so you won't be able to place your face in any scene. As we have mentioned, a simple photograph works, but the results improve when we complete the facial recognition assistant, which will take several photos from different angles and ask us to open and close our eyes and mouth. And this is where the question arises. What could ZAO developers do with this very accurate scan of our face?
The privacy of viral apps
As they point out in The Verge, ZAO belongs to the developer Changsha Shendurongue Network Technology, a company that according to Bloomberg is a subsidiary of Momo, a Chinese company that owns a live streaming service and a dating service. Could they use our faces for something?
Well power, they can. And you yourself have given them permission to do so by installing the application and accepting the conditions of use. That is the alarm that has quickly gone off among users after learning that in its privacy policy the developer obtains all possible permissions, since it speaks of a "free, irrevocable, permanent, transferable and licensed" license for everything that be generated by the user in the application.
Here's for Asian representation in Hollywood? #ZAO #HAVE #Deepfake pic.twitter.com/qrSs3VajfL
—Allan Xia (@AllanXia) 1th September 2019
Such has been the social repercussion that this information has generated, that the application has been forced to issue a statement informing that the data captured (photos and videos) are only used to improve the performance of the application, and that in addition all the data stored will be deleted from the servers when users delete the data in the application.