Revealed
PASSING THE ZUCK
Facebook DENIES it’s behind sinister ’10 year challenge’ conspiracy to harvest your face
Is Facebook using a meme to collect data on people's faces?
FACEBOOK has denied it is using a viral social media challenge to harvest data about your face.
Suspicions were raised this week that the 10-year challenge, which has people sharing dramatic side-by-side photos of how their appearance has changed, is part of a sinister Facebook campaign to upgrade its creepy facial recognition robots.
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But the scandal-hit firm has hit back at the claims, insisting the meme is simply "evidence of the fun people have on Facebook".
The quip was part of a snarky response to a article about the meme, which has spread across sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram since the start of the year.
It asks you to share a photo from 10 years ago alongside your current profile picture to show your friends how you've changed.
Wired journalist Kate O'Neill wrote that it was "plausible" Facebook could be using the pictures to train its photo-scanning algorithms.
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She said that while many of the photos used for 10-year posts are already on the internet, the meme would help Facebook's all-knowing AI to grow because unsuspecting users label their snaps with specific dates and locations.
"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)," O'Neill wrote.
"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.
Celebrities take on the 10 year challenge, and some of them haven't aged in a decade!
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"In other words, thanks to this meme, there’s now a very large dataset of carefully curated photos of people from roughly 10 years ago and now."
Facebook lashed back at O'Neill, insisting it was not behind the challenge.
"The 10 year challenge is a user-generated meme that started on its own, without our involvement," it wrote on Twitter.
"It’s evidence of the fun people have on Facebook, and that’s it."
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In a separate comment, Facebook said it "gains nothing from this meme", and reminded users they can turn off facial recognition at any time.
The tech titan's blase attitude to people's photos has been exposed before.
The social network admitted last month it gave app makers too much access to the photos of up to 6.8million users in yet another privacy gaffe.
The bug meant that outsiders will have been able to see photos you never posted to Facebook – an incredibly serious breach of privacy.
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Facebook didn't immediately warn users about the mistake.
But in a post to its developer blog, Facebook's Tomer Bar wrote: "Our internal team discovered a photo API bug that may have affected people who used Facebook Login and granted permission to third-party apps to access their photos.
"We have fixed the issue but, because of this bug, some third-party apps may have had access to a broader set of photos than usual for 12 days between September 13 to September 25, 2018."
Do you think Facebook is using the 10-year challenge for its sinister plans? Let us know in the comments!
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