Technology

Are Facebook and Instagram manipulating you with the #10YearChallenge?

DailyBiteJanuary 16, 2019 | 17:05 IST

Social media is a strange place. A place where a challenge thrown in jest can see the image of an egg go on to garner more likes and shares than that of a picture of Kylie Jenner.

Where something like the Kiki, Ice Bucket or the Mannequin Challenge can go viral overnight. 

And where the latest in this list of fads is Facebook and Instagram's #10YearChallenge.

In a nutshell, the challenge involves participants posting a picture from 2019 right beside one from about 10 years ago to show how they have aged over the years. As is with most things on social media these days, many have taken up the challenge to show off impressive transformations. 

A number of celebrities too have taken up the challenge and given a nice light spin to it.

But even as hundreds of thousands of people look at the #10YearChallenge as an innocuous social media fad — and participate in it without any reservations — there are voices that have emerged to point out how this could all be an elaborate ploy by the Menlo Park-based tech giant to collect data on its users for a facial recognition system that it's developing. 

Facebook's facial recognition system

Earlier last year, Facebook announced to the world its plans of incorporating new 'face recognition features' to the social media platform. 

According to Facebook, the users who opt for this feature can be notified automatically when they appear in a photo on the platform. The pitch is that this feature can protect users against people using your photos to create fake profiles and help you get automatically tagged in pictures that you haven't been already.  

Now, for this system to function optimally, the core ingredient required is data – lots and lots of it. Data in the form of pixels that can be fed into an AI-based machine learning software which can sift through billions of photos on the platform to find any picture with similar pixel data. 

Where does the #10YearChallenge fit in?

This particular feature — though seemingly innocuous — gives Facebook permission to use a person's pictures to collect facial recognition data on them. Data which tomorrow can be used to monitor not just a user's digital footprint, but rather, their real-world movement too. 

But before this feature can be turned into reality, Facebook needs a lot of credible data on its users.

Not just random sets of images uploaded to the platform over the years, but rather, images that specify when an image was clicked, helping the platform approximate the age of a user and figure out how they will look five years from now on a busy street in New Delhi. 

And this is where the #10YearsChallenge can come in handy for Facebook, and others looking to create facial recognition software like this as it gives them a base set of credible data that can be fed to a sophisticated machine learning codes. 

Now, this is not to say that it's exactly what's being planned by Facebook.

For all we know, Zuckerberg and Co may not have any such nefarious plans in store. However, Facebook's actions in the last year or so do not inspire much confidence. The social media platform has time and again found newer, more invasive ways to breach the data privacy of its users. 

As such, it may indeed be a good idea to not blindly trust technology – and least of all, its self-appointed guardians such as Facebook.

Perhaps that's where the real #Challenge lies.

Also read: Is Asus' ROG Strix GTX 1070 TI good for gaming on a budget?

Last updated: January 16, 2019 | 20:14
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