10-YEAR CHALLENGE: FACEBOOK RESPONDS TO SUGGESTIONS MEME WAS CREATED TO TRAIN ITS ALGORITHMS
The 10-year challenge is just “fun” and not being used for any other ends, Facebook has said amid suggestions it could be harvesting data from people’s old photos.
The challenge has spread across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and recent days, encouraging people to post photos of themselves now alongside ones from 2009. Huge number of images have been posted, including by some of the world’s biggest celebrities.
But as the popularity has grown, so have warnings that images posted onto Facebook and Instagram can be mined for any potential data that might be useful to the companies.
Join Independent Minds
For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just $9.99 a month
Start your free trial
Some even suggested that the meme could have been intentionally created by Facebook, as a way of helping to generate photographs to train an AI that would be able to guess how people age.
“Let’s say you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on aging,” tweeted Wired’s editor Nicholas Thompson, alongside a link to a piece on his website exploring the possibilities for data collection. “What would do? Maybe start a meme like #10yearchallenge.”
The article Mr Thompson linked to did not say explicitly that Facebook had created the meme, though it suggested that it may have. It ended with a suggestion that people “treat our own data with respect”, and that we should ask the same of the companies who store it.
No comments:
Post a Comment