Viral ’10-Year Challenge’ Raises Data Mining Concerns

The latest trend of 2019 is something called the “10 Year Challenge.” It has gone viral on social media, leading millions to post side-by-side photos of themselves from a decade ago and now.

While it may seem fun at first to see all the changes that occurred within the time span, tech experts say participants would be giving up valuable data without even knowing.

Author Kate O’Neill addressed potential privacy concerns in a Wire op-ed, pointing out that seemingly harmless games and hashtags is a way for someone to teach a facial recognition algorithm on how to detect human aging. The searchable, neatly packaged information that comes with taking part in the challenge could be used as training data for the algorithms powering artificial intelligence and facial recognition.

“Sure, you could mine Facebook for profile pictures and look at posting dates or EXIF data. But that whole set of profile pictures could end up generating a lot of useless noise,” O’Neill wrote. “People don’t reliably upload pictures in chronological order, and it’s not uncommon for users to post pictures of something other than themselves as a profile picture.”

In response to her op-ed, Facebook released a statement in which it denied the possibility of secretly mining data from the photos.

“Facebook did not start this trend, and the meme uses photos that already exist on Facebook,” the company wrote.

By: Maytinee Kramer