When you report or comment on a news story, the first step is to understand what it says. Low-quality websites have ways of appearing to say more than they do. They aim to create a panic and attract links. A careful reading may show there isn’t much substance to what happened.

Let’s look at a Daily Mail article claiming that an application called “New Profile Pic” “hoovers up your details.” A careful reading shows that doesn’t mean much.

(HTML note: I’ve linked to that article with the attribute rel="nofollow". That tells search engines that I don’t want it counted as a link toward the article’s search rank.)

The article goes on:

By agreeing to download the app, users are willing to share their location, details about the device they are using as well as other photographs on their social media feeds.

The company’s data policy is clear that ‘we collect certain personal information that you voluntarily provide to us’.

It continues: ‘We collect your name, email address, user name, social network information and other information you provide when you register.’

They also collect data on the user from other companies and combine it with their own dossier.

The firm also collects the IP address, browser type and settings from a computer or the device data from a mobile phone handset.

That’s more than some people are comfortable with. I avoid giving my email address out, since I don’t want spam. Requesting “social network information” pushes the envelope a bit more, but it’s not that unusual.

What are “experts” warning users about? The warning the article cites is pretty generic: “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.” People are often much too trusting of applications and will download anything. I’m not going to install New Profile Pic, but it doesn’t especially stand out from thousands of others in its untrustworthiness.

Contrast this with what LinkedIn wants if you want to display your Twitter address in your profile. It wants authorization to (partial list):

• Follow and unfollow accounts for you.
• Update your profile and account settings.
• Post and delete Tweets for you, and engage with Tweets posted by others (Like, un-Like, or reply to a Tweet, Retweet, etc.) for you.
• Create, manage, and delete Lists and collections for you.
• Mute, block, and report accounts for you.

Now that’s something to worry about! Presumably at least one person in the history of the world has handed over those permissions to LinkedIn, or it would have given up. New Profile Pic’s requests are modest by comparison.

If the Daily Mail’s message were “Be more careful in uploading personal information,” I’d agree with it completely. But its angle is that the application has a vague connection to Russia. Fear of Russia sells. How much of a connection is there? Let’s look at the Snopes analysis.

On both Google’s and Apple’s app store, the developer’s location is listed as being Tortola in the British Virgin Islands.

The claim that this app was connected to Russia or the Kremlin was based on screenshots that supposedly showed how the website newprofilepic.com had been registered in Moscow.

When we looked up this domain on May 11, our results showed that this website was registered in Florida. We reached out to Linerock Investments for more information, and a spokesperson told us that, previously, the domain was indeed registered in Moscow because the company’s founder had lived there. However, the spokesperson said that that person had relocated, and so the company changed the address of the domain registration “to avoid any confusion.”

In the end, it’s a scare story with little substance.

If you want to write about the risks of downloading applications in general, New Profile Pic might be worth mentioning as a data point. There are bigger risks you can talk about, though. Outright malware often sneaks past screening efforts and turns up on Apple’s and Google’s application stores. However you approach a topic, make sure you understand what your sources say. If you fail to do that, you’ll end up looking silly, just as the Daily Mail has.