ZAO apologizes over privacy fears 
2019-09-04
The developer of face-swap application ZAO, which is one of the most downloaded apps on China’s iOS store, apologized over privacy leakage and payment security concerns yesterday.
“We apologize for causing doubts and troubles,” ZAO’s operations team said on Weibo.
It also promised to delete users’ information when they delete accounts and protect their data, “based on national law and regulations.”
ZAO took social media by storm when it was released last week. It allows users to become “stars” just by replacing the faces of real actors and actresses with clips from popular movies like “Titanic,” “the Game of Thrones” and “the Big Bang Theory.”
The app, which is not available in the Western markets, is developed by MoMo, a social app developer. The Deepfake technology uses AI software to take pictures of someone and map their face onto a video of someone else.
During the weekend, many people shared their video clips on the WeChat Moments, creating quite a stir. But there was concern about its unreasonable agreement that touched on privacy and safety issues.
In the United States, the Deepfake technology was used to target film stars and celebrities in pornographic videos.
ZAO users were also worried that the collection of their personal photos may cause payment security because “facial recognition” is used for payment now such as Alipay.
ZAO insisted yesterday that it only stores avatar photo information and not biometric facial information, which is required to make payment.
It, therefore, said that the concern over payment security was unfounded.
The debate on ZAO shows the two sides of artificial intelligence: the technology makes life easy and fun but users have to contribute or “sacrifice” personal data to use the AI.
Industry insiders also warned: Where is the balance between AI and privacy?
“Siri collects and stores certain information from your device to more accurately complete personalized tasks,” Apple said in a statement recently. Apple admitted using audio recording and transcripts to “train” Siri to improve.
Apple was also targeted by consumers and industry officials recently for allowing Siri to “listen in” without authorization.
“In this particular case, I choose to trade privacy for fun,” said He Xiaomei, a Shanghai-based journalist, who read the agreement carefully before signing up for ZAO.
