Is the 10 Year Challenge a scam?
TREND COULD BE TRAINING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The 10 Year Challenge, a trending social media meme in which users post photos of themselves from 10 years ago, is raising warnings from tech experts that all signs point to it being a clandestine operation to harvest personal data.
“It would be very, very unlikely for it just to be fun,” said David Murakami Wood, the Queen’s University-based Canada Research Chair in surveillance studies.
Given the images being collected, their likely usage would be to train artificial intelligence software on how to recognize human aging.
The theory was first raised in a WIRED editorial by Kate O’neill, founder of the tech consultancy KO Insights.
“Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics,” she wrote. “Ideally, you’d want a broad and rigorous data set with lots of people’s pictures.”
Best of all, the images posted for the 10 Year Challenge are all spaced precisely 10 years apart, giving a uniform aging benchmark.
“Having access to a million facial images that are 10 years apart can indeed help in developing powerful algorithms,” said Naimul Khan, head of Ryerson’s Multimedia Research Laboratory, which has done research with facial and emotion recognition.
There would be pitfalls to the data, such as the possibility that users are lying, but Khan noted that facial age recognition is indeed a “hot research topic.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that a fun social media meme has actually been a secret data mining operation. Cambridge Analytica, the British firm now under investigation for harvesting personal information for political purposes, got much of its data from a seemingly harmless app called This Is Your Digital Life. Promoted to Facebook users as a personality test, the app exploited Facebook’s loose privacy rules in order to extract the personal data not only of the app’s users, but also the users’ friends.
In 2015, Microsoft went viral with How-old.net, a site in which users uploaded their portrait to have a computer engine guess their age. Although developers claimed that they did not keep any of the photos, they were keeping user metadata such as age, gender and even their geographic location.
“We’re not being paranoid about this … we have a lot of evidence that this is being done in all kinds of ways all the time,” said Murakami Wood.
The origins of the 10 Year Challenge meme are somewhat murky. Shortly after New Year’s, Facebook users began posting a contemporary photo next to their first profile photo under the title “How Hard Did Aging Hit You?” According to Knowyourmeme.com, one of the first age comparison posts came on Jan. 11 from Oklahoma meteorologist Damon Lane.
The challenge soon migrated to Twitter and Instagram and adopted the #10Yearchallenge hashtag. It has now all spread around the world, attracting everyone from Bollywood stars to Singapore’s prime minister.
Face recognition technology is still in its infancy, and one of its biggest hurdles is that people’s faces change over time; they turn from children into adults, they grow beards. Cracking the code of recognizing how humans age would open up entirely new frontiers in marketing, military and even social research.
“Vast quantities of images cannot only be used to train a neural network to recognize specific individuals, but taken 10 years apart (could) obtain an insight onto how aging processes work,” said Marina Gavrilova, head of the University of Calgary’s Biometric Technologies Lab.
With a deep analysis of the 10 Year Challenge images, a program could conceivably learn which demographic groups are aging faster and whether some people are aged more prematurely by their jobs.
Facebook has denied there is any ulterior motive to the 10 Year Challenge. In a Tweet to WIRED magazine, the company wrote “the 10 year challenge is a user-generated meme that started on its own, without our involvement.”
The social media giant already has more than 250 billion of its users’ timestamped images. According to Naimal Khan, companies like Facebook would not need to rely on the “ad hoc” data of the 10 Year Challenge when they could “automatically crawl through your photo archive to do it in a more rigorous manner.”
However, that still leaves open the possibility of 10 Year Challenge images being used by a Cambridge Analytica-style outsider.
Andrew Clement, a surveillance and privacy researcher at the University of Toronto, called it “highly plausible” that Facebook or some outside entity is using the images to calibrate facial recognition technology.
Just last month a New York Times investigation found that Facebook had been allowing outside firms such as Netflix to read the private messages of its users.
The company “doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt” said Clement.