You’re probably too busy and glamorous to let a little old niggle like the grim inevitability of death darken your day.
But people around the world are grappling with the miserable reality of ageing and mortality after downloading an app and joining a viral challenge.
Millions of people are using FaceApp to artificially age photos of their beautiful, youthful visage to give them a glimpse of how they might look when the years begin to bite.
People have been sharing the results on social media, posting the best-looking ones on Instagram to remind the world just how beautiful they are and always will be.
On Twitter, where darker human sentiments go to fester, people have been sharing the grim existential crises they suffered after gazing upon a vision of their aged selves.
‘FaceApp is scary,’ wrote South African Twitter personality Christo Thurston.
‘It is a prophet of doom.’
‘I am NOT happy about the images that FaceApp made of me when I used their aging filter,’ wrote record producer Chris W Ryan from Belfast.
‘It has caused me emotional distress and deep existential dread – they will be hearing from my legal team,’ he joked.
Another Twitter user added: ‘This FaceApp stuff is all fun and games until you have an existential crisis and realized that you and everyone you know will become old and die.’
Comedian Mark Mehigan had a rather heartbreaking encounter with the coldness of life as well as the chill of death.
He tweeted: ‘Just posted a photo of my late grandad on Instagram as it’s the anniversary of his death and people think it’s a Faceapp so keep commenting “lol” and “old c***” underneath it.’
One refusenik said he was not going to use FaceApp until it offered him the ability to enhance his bodies in ways he found desirable.
‘I’m refusing to partake in the #faceappchallenge I’m already in the middle of an existential crisis about being 37, I don’t need to feel older,’ he wrote.
‘Create an app that shows me what I’d look like with a million quid and a massive nob. I’d be all up for that.’
Other social media users were more philosophical in their outlook.
Tech columnist Navneet Aang wrote: ‘The pleasure of faceapp is the sublimated fear of death, containerized, aestheticized.’
A host of celebs have been sharing their own FaceApp makeovers, including Piers Morgan and Marvin and Rochelle Humes.
But there’s a more sinister side to the free-to-download app that users need to be aware of.
Whether or not you use an iPhone or an Android device, FaceApp says that by using its services it can keep hold of your pictures.
According to the app’s Privacy Policy, it says it collects all the images you upload to the service. But, going further, it also states that it can collect other content that includes ‘photos and other materials that you post through’ FaceApp.
The issue was brought to light after a developer called Joshua Nozzi posted on Twitter that the app tried to upload other photos from his library to its platform.
However, not everyone agreed that the app automatically started rooting around in your photo library.
Given the amount of sensitive data that people hold in their phone’s photo stream (think bank statements, addresses, receipts, etc) they should always exercise a bit of caution before installing a new app and giving it access to their photos.
And make no mistake, FaceApp is storing up the photos that you upload to it. The company’s policy states that it ‘will not rent or sell your information to third parties outside FaceApp,’ but it does explicitly say that it shares information with ‘third-party advertising partners.’
Despite the concerns over privacy, FaceApp has lit up the internet for the second time thanks to the age filter.
The Russian-developed app first went viral in 2017 but has reemerged since adding the option for users to advance their ages.
The results speak for themselves.
The good news is that, at any time, users are able to send a request to an app to find out exactly how much of their personal information is being stored.
Under the GDPR legislation, a company can be asked to delete your personal information unless they can demonstrably prove that they need to keep hold of it.
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