#10YearChallenge a boon to FB’s facial recognition AI?

The #10YearChallenge was all fun and memes until last week, when a tweet moved thousands of people to worry: Are we unknowingly helping giant corporations to improve their algorithms for biometric identification and age progression?

The #10YearChallenge gained widespread traction on social media this month. It calls for posting two photos of yourself side by side — one from today and one from a decade ago — to show how you’ve changed. People are participating mostly on Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

Some made jokes, paid tribute to old hairstyles or drew attention to issues like global warming. Celebrities posted glamour shots that showed negligible changes from one decade to the next. But one post went viral without featuring any side-by-side photos at all. It was written by Kate O’Neill, the author of the book “Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans.” “Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram. Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition,”she tweeted last week.

Her words hit a nerve. People responded with concerns about whether they were helping the tech giant get better at identifying people. O’Neill’s post got more than 10,000 retweets and more than 20,000 likes.

Lauren A Rhue, an assistant professor of information systems and analytics at the Wake Forest School of Business, said the #10YearChallenge could conceivably provide a relatively clean data set for a company that wanted to work on age-progression technology. “The risk in giving up any type of biometric data to a company is that there’s not enough transparency, not only about how the data is currently being used, but also the future uses for it,” she said.

Facebook has responded to concerns about photos and privacy in the past. The company said it does not intend to help strangers identify you, and has repeatedly pointed out that users can disable face recognition in their personal settings. As for the 10-year challenge, Facebook said it’s just a fun trend. “The 10-year challenge is a user-generated meme that started on its own, without our involvement,” it said on Twitter.