[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 121 (Thursday, July 18, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4926-S4927]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                FaceApp

  Madam President, on another matter, over the past couple of days, 
millions of Americans have been downloading FaceApp--a viral tool that 
applies a little AI technology to a selfie to make your face look 
younger or older or add a beard. That seems like a benign new social 
media fad, but it actually may not be benign at all.
  Who is the parent company of this app? Wireless Labs. It is based in, 
of all places, St. Petersburg, Russia. It also came to light that the 
app not only takes your picture but retains the right to access all 
your photos, your search history, and gives ``perpetual, irrevocable, 
and worldwide'' license to use your photo, your name, and your 
likeness. This is a breathtaking level of access--all too common in 
murky apps like these--that raises very substantial privacy concerns.
  After everything we learned about Russia's unrepentant cyber 
aggression in 2016, the nexus of facial recognition, digital privacy, 
and a shadowy Russian company based in St. Petersburg, where so much of 
the Russian interference in our elections and interference with the 
internet emerged from, what happened with this app from Wireless Labs 
called FaceApp should set off alarm bells for all Americans.

[[Page S4927]]

  At the very least, we need to know more about what the heck is going 
on here. I have called for the FTC and the FBI to investigate FaceApp 
to see if private information of millions of Americans could wind up in 
the wrong hands and used for very bad purposes. We need more than the 
assurances; we need the facts. The potential for our facial data and 
the data from all of our friends and families contained in our photos 
to fall into the hands of something like Russian intelligence or the 
Russian military is really troubling. I strongly urge the FTC and the 
FBI to get to the bottom of FaceApp.