MEDIA WATCH: FaceApp – a vanity project with little beauty

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
6
14

FaceApp adds decades to your age for fun, but popular app raises privacy concerns

If you’re wondering why your social media feed is being flooded by photos of wrinkle-enhanced celebrities and (suddenly) old friends, thank FaceApp.

Personalities as varied as Drake, LeBron James, Gordon Ramsey and the Jonas Brothers have tapped the photo-editing app to fuel the future-self craze on Instragram, Facebook and Twitter. As of 11am Wednesday, FaceApp was the top trending free offering in Apple’s App Store. FaceApp has altered photos for more than 80 million users since its 2017 release.

I think it really says something about our total terror of ageing & being old in a selfie narcissist youth worshipping culture that we get a social media tsunami of genuinely frightened FaceApp portraits grieving at their own self demise.

Our fear and loathing of age seems terribly damaged considering we will all be ageing at some stage in our life cycle, our nuclear family unit culture (moulded to maximise consumer culture consumption) moved old people off to Gods waiting room with the expectation they would die quickly and quietly please. This disconnect and amputation of the wider family unit has created parts of society that simply don’t interact.

The horror of ageing that is being shared on social media speaks to this age stratification in a very lonely and sad way.

A vanity project with little beauty.

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6 COMMENTS

  1. It must be hard for an app to add more wrinkles to Gordon Ramsay’s face.

    If you tried Bruce Jenner’s photo, would you get Caitlyn? Actually, would get any of the Kardashians right with all the cosmetic procedures they’ve had done?

    If the app wanted to be realistic, it could at least give some people that distant stare that accompanies dementia.

  3. Yuk.
    Sometimes, when I walk outside to the many wondrous non human faces and multiple eyes which watch me plod about of a morning I ponder how to apologise to them all for us lot.

  4. Gawd….cut price facelifts anybody?

    ….and whatever happened to anonymity?….the Tibetans dont like having their photos taken, nor do many other primal peoples….they say it takes a bit of their soul

  5. Its the next Woke Twaterati project. Age is to be removed from all ID as its discriminatory to identify a person’s age in the post modern Woke World. It is a major cause of serious mental health issues and suicide. It puts people at a disadvantage to one another all throughout their lives and hurts their feelings.

  6. Why would anyone in their right mind want to play around with something as ridiculous and as dubious as FaceApp?

    We are what/who we are regardless. Ageing is what comes naturally in this life. Those of us who have reached the senior years of our lives with reasonable good health, should embrace that fact, be thankful for it and enjoy what comes with it, wrinkles, creaking joints, saggy bits and all.

    The only benefit I can see from this application, is profit for the cosmetic surgery industry, keeping the panicking wealthy vain looking grossly hideous, in an attempt to avoid looking their perceived age.

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