Twinning

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About

Twinning is an app created by PopSugar which pairs a user's selfie to a celebrity they look most like. The app was mired in controversy at the end of 2018 when it was discovered that it had been leaking the selfies taken by their users.

History

PopSugar announced Twinning on February 13th, 2018.^[1] The app has users take a selfie and then pairs that selfie with five celebrity lookalike and offers a percentage on how similar that person looks to those celebrities.

1. 2. 95% MATCH SEE YOUR CELEBRITY LOOK-ALIKE UPLOAD OR SNAP A PIC

Leaked Selfies

On December 31st, 2018, TechCrunch^[2] reported that the photos uploaded to the app were easily downloadable due to an issue with the site's permissions.

All of the uploaded photos are stored in a storage bucket hosted on Amazon Web Services. We know because the web address of the bucket is in the code on the Twinning tool’s website. Open that in your web browser, and we saw a real-time stream of uploaded photos.

According to TechCrunch, after discovering the leak and emailing PopSugar, the bucket was quickly locked down. Mike Patnode, Vice President of PopSugar later admitted to TechCrunch that the bucket was not set up correctly. The leaks were also covered by Gizmodo^[3] and Daily Dot.^[4]