10 Year Challenge: A Social media Scam Or A Funny Memes Post?
If you frequently use Social media, you must have noticed a trend in the past two weeks of people posting their selfies side-by-side, one at current age in 2019 and another one from ten years ago, 2009.
Hollywood celebrities like Tom Cruise, Reese Witherspoon, Kate Hudson, Isla Fisher, Ryan Seacrest, etc. all are seen promoting this challenge. It is fun to see actors and giant businessman making fun of themselves in this 10-year-challenge.
As a result, we are now witnessing the first viral trend of 2019 that started on Facebook but also storming on Instagram and Twitter. The fad seen on Facebook and Instagram prompted people to post their side-by-side selfies with caption #10yearchallenge.
Is 10 Year Challenge A Scam?
According to reports from Web Analysts, this challenge generated more than 5 million Facebook interactions just in three days which is a record. On the contrary, security experts are reminding people not to share the pictures because Facebook is using this data for their data mining purposes.
Tech expert like Kate O’Neill described this challenge as a nefarious process of data mining because Facebook 10 year challenge is helping in the advancement of image recognition algorithms.
Several reports suggest that Facebook already has photographic data of each FB users. But, chronological order is missing! Additionally, Facebook might use this data to develop algorithms that could benefit in image recognition of all Facebook users.
People via this challenge are writing out the exact year of difference in the photos and unknowingly making the margin of error in the Facebook facial recognition algorithm much slighter.
In many versions of the meme, people even got instructions to post their first profile picture. This information is very important as it can help to train algorithms in age-related characteristics and progressions.
In other words, Facebook 10 year challenge mines data (especially images) and would help only if users have a simple, clean labeled set of photos (then-and-now).
Due to Facebook challenge, artificial intelligence is carefully curating a very large dataset of people’s photos at an age difference of 10 years. This example can judge the intelligence:
Suppose you post a picture of cat 10 years ago and now, then this particular sample post will be thrown out because AI is sophisticated enough to pick out human face.
Is It Safe To Take 10-Year-Challenge?
Whether it is true or not, but one thing is sure that 10 year challenge harmless meme is a good move to strengthen the Facebook image recognition algorithms. For this part, Facebook is facing its biggest criticism from tech experts, cybersecurity firms, security experts, web analysts, etc.
While a Facebook spokesperson completely denied all the blames and criticisms and said, “This challenge was a user-generated meme that went viral on its own. Facebook didn’t start this meme and got no benefit from it.”
The spokesperson further added that Facebook users have the liberty to on or off the facial recognition option by themselves. People are free to use it and the photographic data will remain in their own profiles.
But, cybersecurity experts aren’t convinced because something at this level has already happened in the past when Cambridge Analytica extracted 70 million Facebook users data.
There could be many other 10 year challenge drawbacks but the challenge became serious when people started circulating social and global issues like Irani War and LGBTQQ problems.
Amazon in 2016 introduced this real-time facial recognition. According to cybersecurity experts, 10-year-challenge took this to greater heights for data mining.
Will this challenge rock the world or secretly would help silicon companies to advance their artificial intelligence technologies. It is unclear and remains to be seen in the near future.
Regardless of anything, Fb’s 10-year challenge is a great hit and the first viral trend that completely took upon all Social media platforms.
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