Since its first moment of global viral spread, the Russian-based face editor FaceApp has prompted many security and privacy concerns among people, especially in the US. Since people usually shed inhibitions on Google, searching about their insecurities and fears, this analysis takes advantage of searches related to face editor apps that have similar privacy policies in order to map what people think about them.
Main Findings
FaceApp was perceived as troublesome in relation to privacy and security, in both the United States and Russia, in comparison to the other two apps in the research. Furthermore, no keywords associated with negative concerns were found on the queries related to Snapchat.
Americans are more concerned with safety and privacy in terms of FaceApp than Russians. This is also reflected by more negative keywords appearing on the Google results.
Approximately 20% of the keywords that show concerns that emerged from the American Google Search queries are interconnected with Russia, indicating that the people from the United States are partially scared of FaceApp due to its Russian origin.
Protocol
