Gabriela changes the texture and color of your skin with the GrainA4 filter. Lara sharpens her cheekbones and plumps lips with Holy Natural. And raquel he puts on some horns and stretch your eyes with BBYDemon. All three are about to finish high school and all three began using filters on Snapchat when they turned 14. The social network born in 2011 in the US was the first to create default filters for users to share their retouched photos. Until that moment, only the stars of fashion, cinema and music had it easy to remove a mark from their skin, a stretch mark or change the color of their eyes. Photoshop ruled the productions for paper and digital magazines. With the advent of filters, the retouching was democratized. And it became a simple task.
That it is good news is another thing. Most adolescent and young users have grown up with the culture of selfie embedded in his brain. When you look at your screen smartphone they prepare the face to show its best gesture, rehearse the pose before taking the self-portrait, test effects and apply photo editing filters before sharing the image. A artificial intelligence it will modify what they see on their phone. Gabriela, Lara and Raquel have it clear: “I wear a filter if I have a bad day and it is reflected in my face”, “I wear it to have a laugh with my friends”, “I like to play, put on a cat’s nose day or freckles ”.
What Tate Ryan Mosley said recently, a technology reporter in the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) magazine, “The face filters that have become common on social media are perhaps the most widespread use of augmented reality. Researchers they still don’t understand the impact They may have sustained use of augmented reality, but they know there are real risks, and with face filters, girls are the ones taking that risk. They are subjects of an experiment which will show how technology changes the way we form our identities, represent ourselves and relate to others. And this is happening without much supervision ”.
Famous characters
Gabriela sums it up very well, not one of her photos uploaded to social networks naturally shows what it is like: “I use filters every day, with Borboleta I put the photo in black and white with butterflies; with BBYDemon I make my lips bigger. I see a filter in a photo that I like, take the name, click, I try it and then I decide if I keep that filter and send it to a friend ”.
This is where famous people come into play. For example, the followers of Kylie Jenner, the famous influenceUS model and businesswoman take notice of the filters you use and incorporate them into your phone.
Most of these retouching tools use computer vision techniques to analyze in detail and understand a real world image. For example, your face. A computer detects a face and overlays a invisible facial mesh To which you can add dog ears, cat whiskers, horns or remove the pimples. Augmented reality and retouching techniques that are successful on Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok.
Have a laugh or beautify
In the Tate report, Ryan Mosley talks about make-up artist and photographer Caroline Rocha, for whom the filters were very useful in a difficult life moment. After seeing someone very dear to her pass away and herself suffer a stroke, the Instagram filters were his consolation. He tried them but also researched about them, met creators of augmented reality for aesthetics and beauty. And he had a lot of fun. Today, your opinion has changed, you have found that beauty filters have won the battle against artistic effect filters for fun. “Many women don’t want to be seen without these filters, because in their mind they think they look like this. Everything has become a bit sick, ”explains Rocha.
Not long ago, filters were applied to have a laughToday filters are beautification tools.
And then there is the issue of how it affects the privacy of the user, mostly teenagers and young people. Taking a quick look at the main photo retouching and editing applications we look at the number of trackers and permissions they request. As we already told you a few weeks ago, it is important to know the fine print of the apps that you download. They all use trackers that collect private user information. And all request the right to access your camera, microphone, contacts, files or location.
Trackers, permissions and ‘fleeceware’
We have attended the French platform Exodus to know the trackers and permissions of the main photo editing applications. For example, Facetune has 21 trackers and 16 access permissions; Beauty Camera version 1.5.2 uses 11 trackers and 66 permissions; Beauty Plus, 16 and 30; Retrica, 8 and 31; and YouCam Perfect, 9 trackers and 21 permissions.
To make matters worse, last week a list of applications that camouflage bulky weekly, monthly or annual fees under the trial period. It is what is known as fleeceware. Well, the applications that abuse the most by charging the fee once the free time of use has passed and that later costs a lot to uninstall are those that have to do with the Image editing and photo filter packs.
According to Avast, an expert firm in digital security and privacy, more than 200 applications They use these quasi-fraudulent techniques. “They add more than a billion downloads and have managed to raise more than 400 million dollars,” they explain from Avast. The most are advertised on social networks such as Instagram, TikTok or Facebook.
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