2019年7月18日

Viral app that makes you look old with shocking precision may be quietly keeping all your data

FaceApp is the most popular free app on Google Play and Apple’s App Store thanks to an age filter that makes people in photos look much older. But while countless photos of aged celebrities and casual FaceApp users have been shared online in the past week, there are mounting concerns with how FaceApp handles user data.

FaceApp first became popular in 2017; the app uses?artificial intelligence to alter people’s faces?with a variety of filters.?FaceApp’s?terms of service?give the company licence to use photos and other information uploaded by users for commercial purposes, including their names, likenesses, and voices. The terms of service also say that FaceApp may continue to store user data after it’s deleted from the app. The company said the data could be retained to comply with “certain legal obligations,” but there is no limitation on how long the data can be kept.?Furthermore, FaceApp’s privacy policy?says that all information collected by the app can be stored and transferred to whichever countries FaceApp and its affiliates operate from.

The company said it also accepted user requests to remove all personal data from their servers. However, FaceApp said the support team was backlogged with those requests. FaceApp also says 99% of users choose not to log in, so they don’t have much in the way of identifying information.

There are some additional security concerns with the iOS version of FaceApp because of the way iPhones handle photo security. While users can block FaceApp and other apps from viewing their full photo libraries through the iPhone’s settings,?TechCrunch reported on a loophole in iOS 11?that gives apps permission to access one photo at a time if the user grants permission.

Elon Musk finally took the wraps off his new brain microchip company

Elon Musk is a busy man.?When he’s not?digging a tunnel underneath a major city?to try and create a new form of transportation, or?starting a major car manufacturer, or trying to?move the human species to Mars, he’s running a company that intends to implant computer chips into human beings.

That company is named Neuralink, and you’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of it – since being announced in 2016, not much has been said about the San Francisco-based startup.

1. Neuralink has three stated goals: Treating brain disorders and helping people who had accidents, creating a brain-machine interface, and building toward a potential symbiosis with artificial intelligence. It?having already received a vast sum in startup capital: $US100 million from Musk himself, and another $US58 million in initial investments. The company’s ambitions are huge: To create brain-machine interfaces that enable your mind to directly interface with external processing power. It's?a measure of potentially fixing complex neurological problems. “I think there’s an incredible amount we can do to solve brain disorders and damage,” Musk said.

2. The moonshot stuff isn’t anywhere close to ready yet:?Neuralink tests its products on monkeys first, and?even says it’s managed to enable some level of mind-based computer control in one such monkey, but it will be quite some time before any of those results show up as consumer products.

3. The end goal for Neuralink goes beyond brain-machine interface — Musk wants nothing less than “a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence.”?His biggest worry is that AI will outright surpass human intelligence and “we will be left behind” as a species. But, if our species can create a “high-bandwidth brain-machine interface,” then we might stand a chance of keeping up.

Here are the executives running the biggest and most important self-driving-car companies

The serious players in the self-driving-vehicle game are starting to emerge.?Over the past few years, Alphabet’s Waymo, GM’s Cruise, Argo AI (funded by Ford and VW), Intel’s Mobileye, and Tesla have all pushed forward in the autonomous-mobility business:

Waymo CEO John Krafcik is among the most experienced executives in the auto industry. An expert on “l(fā)ean” manufacturing, he effectively created Hyundai’s US business before joining Google in 2015.?Waymo launched its first commercial service, Waymo One, in Arizona last year.

Argo AI is an independent company that grew out of the Google Car project and Uber.?Argo AI has benefited from a close relationship with and a $US1 billion investment from Ford, whose CEO, Jim Hackett, is spending $US11 billion to restructure the car maker for future competitiveness.?More recently, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess joined his automaker with Ford in supporting Argo AI. In July, VW invested a total of $US2.6 billion, taking Argo AI’s valuation to more than $US7 billion.

Cruise Automation was acquired in 2016 by General Motors for an all-in price of $US1 billion.?Cruise cofounder Kyle Vogt is the company’s chief technology officer. He’s pushing the driverless systems that could enable Cruise’s commercial rollout in 2019. With investments from GM, Honda, and SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Cruise is valued at $US19 billion.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants his all-electric-car maker to be producing 1 million robo-taxis by 2020.?Tesla’s autonomous dreams are powered by its Autopilot system, which is available on all new Tesla vehicles and able to deliver an advanced version of traditional cruise control.

Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua has been working on driverless technology for longer than anyone on this list. Mobileye, an Israeli startup, has been around since 1999 and was acquired by Intel in 2017 for about $US15 billion.?According Shashua, Mobileye is “all-in on the global robo-taxi opportunity.”