Culture

The App That Compared You To Celebrities Kinda Sorta Leaked All Your Photos

by Joseph Earp  3 January 2019
The Twinning app fell victim to Hackerman

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Hey, you know that Twinning app that spread like wildfire over the internet recently? The one that matched your selfies to the celebrities you supposedly closely resemble? Well, guess what: Popsugar, the folks behind Twinning may have kinda, sorta, definitely leaked all of your photos. Surprise!

Well, we say ‘surprise’ but really this isn’t at all surprising anymore. Actually, these days it would be more surprising if an app that stores facial data wasn’t eventually hacked or leaked.

After all, it’s only been less than a year since the FaceApp shitstorm. Remember that one? That was the face modifier that made you look old, hot, or like a member of the opposite sex, and turned out to be: A) Massively racist (the ‘hot’ setting had a problematic habit of lightening skin tones, and the company even briefly dropped filters to make you resemble other races), and B) Dodgy as all hell.

At least this latest leak is novel in being particularly dumb. See, it turns out that Popsugar made absolutely no attempt to keep your photos secure.

As the folks at TechCrunch discovered, Twinning was saving uploaded photographs in an online storage bucket. And the bucket wasn’t hard to trace: its URL was actually listed in the code on the Twinning website.

For those who don’t speak tech, that’s akin to leaving your key in your locked door, then standing out on the street and asking potential robbers if they need any help finding it.

Turns out Twinning isn't exactly hackproof

Pictured here: A hacker discovering just how little Twinning cares about your security.

Since news of the leak broke, Popsugar has locked the bucket, which is the very definition of closing the stable doors after the digital horses have bolted.

For my part, I knew Popsugar wasn’t to be trusted from the moment the app paired me up with my apparent celebrity doppelganger.

Oh well. See you right back here next time a viral facial recognition app turns out to be extremely dodgy?