A new phone app which offers users a free digital avatar is taking facial-recognition quality photographs and sending them to Moscow, prompting major concerns within the cyber security community. Tens of thousands of people have already uploaded their photographs to the servers of the New Profile Pic app in return to the free avatar. However, many will be unaware that the company behind the app, Linerock Investments, is based in an apartment complex overlooking the Moscow River, beside Russia's Ministry of Defence and just three miles from Red Square. Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor, ESET Internet Security told MailOnline that people have to be incredibly careful when uploading photographs or personal data to a brand new website. He said: '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 and based in another country.'

This week, the denizens of Twitter began posting photos of themselves with an odd array of labels. Some, like "face," were confusingly benign, while others appeared to verify harder truths: Your humble writer was declared a cipher, a nobody, "a person of no influence." But many of the labels were more troubling. There were rape suspects and debtors. A person would be labeled not just black, but "negro" and "negroid."