![]() "We understand that due to the current events in Ukraine, any connection to Russia could raise suspicions," the representative said. He does not live in the Russian Federation now." It is the former Moscow address of the founder of the company. ![]() It is the truth that the domain was registered to the Moscow address. "All user photos are hosted and processed on the Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure servers, which are located outside the Russian Federation. ![]() "We are a company with development offices in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus," a representative for PhotoLab, the company behind the app, told me. Given the war in Ukraine and the history of hackers working in Russia, just the mention of Russia's capital sets off suspicions for some would-be app users.īut the company isn't located in Moscow, though it does have an office in Russia. It turns out the NewProfilePic domain was originally registered in Moscow. Once the app became popular, people began digging into the company's history. The Daily Mail quotes a security expert who says "this app is likely a way of capturing people's faces in high resolution and I would question any app wanting this amount of data, especially one which is largely unheard of." Wait, what's the Russia connection? On Wednesday, the UK tabloid The Daily Mail published a story with the unnerving headline, "Is Russia after YOUR personal data? Experts warn internet users not to download latest online craze New Profile Pic that hoovers up your details." ("Hoovers" as in "vacuums," for those not up on British slang.) People on various social platforms are having fun tinkering not only with their own photos, but images of famous people and pets. It does pretty much what it says - makes your profile image look like a painting, using artificial intelligence. NewProfilePic is an app you can get for iOS or Android. And while the new images may look glamorous, using the app may be a bad idea - but perhaps not for the reason some say. They're likely using a free app called NewProfilePic Picture Editor, the latest social media craze. Maybe you've seen some of your Facebook friends upgrading their profile pictures to look like fancy illustrations of themselves.
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