Is the 10 year challenge a sinister ploy to mine data for facial recognition AI?!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would have seen the 10 year challenge clogging up your social media feed as friends and family dig out their decade-old pictures and post them alongside their most recent pics along with the hashtag #10yearchallenge. While it’s fun to snigger at your mates dodgy hairdo and overplucked eyebrows, it’s worth mentioning that there might be a more sinister reason the viral trend.
Apparently, some people in the tech industry are worried that the Facebook challenge is just a sneaky way to mine data for facial recognition algorithms. Tech expert Kate O’Neill shared her thoughts on Twitter and it’s pretty interesting stuff: She goes on to say:
Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics and, more specifically, on age progression (e.g. how people are likely to look as they get older).
Ideally, you’d want a broad and rigorous dataset with lots of people’s pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart—say, 10 years.I’m not saying anyone should panic or feel bad.
It’s simply worth becoming more mindful of how our data can be used.We don’t need to be wary of everything; we just need to think critically, and learn more about the potential our data has at scale. We’re all still learning.
She’s definitely correct in saying we need to all be more mindful with what we put out there. Only this morning I was considering partying in the 10 year challenge but I think I’ll give it a miss now.
