In recent weeks, the Voilà AI Artist app has become widely used and dominated the feed of Instagram users.
Voilà AI Artist consists of an application that selects a photo from your gallery to transform into a 2D or 3D cartoon. It is published by Wemagine. The app already has more than 5 million installs, just on the Android platform.
The app is free, although it has ads and offers in-house purchases. It doesn’t require login, even from third-party platforms, but it does require some permissions within the app.
The main ones are camera, memory and location.
With the success of the new tool, questions arose about the terms of use and possible risks to the privacy of those who joined the game. The same happened with FaceApp that dominated social media in 2019.
Kaspersky’s digital security experts analyzed Voilà’s privacy terms and found that once a person uses the app to edit a photo, the image becomes the property of the company responsible for the app.
This condition raised a question about how this material collected with the user’s authorization could be used. However, it would not be a matter of commercial interest directly, but of a mechanism for enhancing artificial intelligence and facial recognition capabilities and that could pose risk.
Some information collected by Voilà App are: photos taken directly from the camera or in the gallery, with the metadata present in them (such as location and other details), but denying access to the albums.
The security policy further states that the app may collect information sent by browser or mobile app whenever you access the service. This includes your IP address, browser type, browser version, and the service pages you visit, as well as the time, date and time spent on those sites.
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Voilà can still access your purchase history if you choose to subscribe to the app, and your device details such as smartphone model, operating system and version. Cookie data are others that make up the list.
“I believe that this type of situation will be increasingly common and can be done without any problems, but there are some security and privacy issues that must be taken into account, such as transparency in the use of data and responsibility in the processing and storage of your data. information”. Spoke to Kaspersky.
“It’s important to remember that this data is stored on third-party servers and processed in the cloud. Once the images are owned by the company, it is the company that has the responsibility to protect them and ensure that cybercriminals will not have access to the database. data,” says the company’s specialist.
In order for users to use these facial recognition apps more securely in relation to the information collected during use, the tips are: check the developer’s reliability, always download the apps from official operating system stores, such as Google Play and the App Apple’s Store and reading the privacy terms before downloading to know what data the app will have access to are of paramount importance.
Kaspersky also warns that “the risks of this type of application lie in possible hacker attacks on the data storage system of these companies. By having the photos of so many people under their property, criminals are left with a huge database of images at their disposal. Which, in the hands of gangs and organized digital crime, can generate scams or serve to circumvent authentication systems by facial biometrics”.
