Targeting a segment of people, invading their privacy and tracking people are some of the things that this technology is capable of. While it may be innovative and useful for certain applications - Police in New Delhi tracked down 3,000 missing kids in four days, facial recognition tools can be easily misused. So if you haven't jumped on the buzz, you're gonna be fine.īut if you have posted the #10YearChallenge anywhere, you'd want to believe Facebook's version of the truth.Įven if Facebook didn't initiate the challenge, it has been using facial recognition intelligence for years to recognize users and people they are pictured with. Thanks to the 10 Year Challenge, all of that hard work has already been done. After all, training these facial recognition algorithms takes immense amounts of pre-classified data which can be expensive, time consuming, and include lots of useless noise. It just means that the challenge is a way to easily categorize and classify the data to train facial recognition algorithms. A vast majority of your pictures are publicly available anyway.
Kate's hypothesis doesn't mean you should delete all your social media pictures asap. This could even be used to increase insurance premiums or deny some users coverage! Sinister applications include insurance companies using the data to determine who is aging faster than normal and may be a higher insurance risk.
It's also more useful for technology that is tracking how peoples' looks are changing with age. This is different than the years of photos that users have already uploaded in no particular order and much more easier to analyze. She pointed out that the meme challenge has filled Facebook with labeled, side-by-side user photos taken within a fixed period of time.
Kate then wrote a full article on the Wired. These words resonated with people, evident from thousands of retweets and likes it received. Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and recognition Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram It was all fun and games until a Twitter user, Kate O' Neil tweeted the repercussions of the seemingly innocuous meme challenge. Here's the ageless Mariah Carey tweeting and having a laugh. There were even pictures drawing attention to global warming! Celebs joined in on the action, posting glamour shots. I remember quite a few memes that my friends posted. The #10YearChallenge memes were flashing on Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp - all owned by Facebook. The meme was simple: you post side-by-side pictures of yourself from a decade back and now to show how you have changed. The #10YearChallenge gained huge traction on social media and spread rapidly. But could it be leveraged for something more sinister? Could Facebook be secretly mining data and improving its facial recognition algorithm? You must have seen your friends on Facebook posting the #10YearChallenge all over your news feed.