Your 10-Year-Challenge Memes Could Be Used to Harvest Data for Facial Recognition

By
George Yang
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Last Updated on 2019-01-21 , 6:57 pm

Old people like me don’t understand why youngsters would do challenges online when life itself is challenging enough, but it’s a phenomenon that’s set to stay.

From stupid and dangerous challenges like the Bird Box challenge…

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Image: NBC4

…to harmless and innocuous challenge like the falling star challenge…

Image: Grid.ID

…youngsters have found a way to stay trendy without any mention of salted egg yolk.

Recently, a new viral challenge emerged, and because it’s so innocuous and harmless, everyone’s doing it, including one of our younger colleagues.

Now he looks like a burger instead leh

We all have a good laugh at that, and speculated on how NS could really change a person.

Okay, no harm done so let’s move on?

Apparently not.

This challenge might look completely harmless, but it has made some people very nervous.

Just Recap on Online Privacy

If you’re just a regular dude who uses the Internet to humble-brag about your latest car that you rented (and tell others online that you bought it due to your hustling), then you might not know the online privacy hoo-ha that’s been ongoing for months.

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Facebook has been hit with countless scandals pertaining to the way they treat their users’ privacy: from the Cambridge Analytica issue that exposed over 87 million users’ private data to Cambridge Analytica to Facebook still allowing selected organisations access to our data, people have been more critical about what they post online, for even if you’ve set everything to “private”, bad actors with malicious intentions can still know what your favourite food is.

It doesn’t help that Singapore has been hit with a few data breaches as well, with the most prominent one being the SingHealth data breach.

And it’s only today that it’s revealed that there’s a breached data of over 770 million emails and over 21 million passwords being found by an Internet security researcher.

In other words, as you mindlessly go to the Internet, you’re exposing your privacy every single second. Even your password.

So what has this got to do with the 10-Year-Challenge, which looks so innocent?

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Well, it actually isn’t that innocent. Read on and you’ll realise the Internet is darker than you think it is.

Facial Recognition: An Old Technology That Looks New

If you watch US thrillers often, you’ll certainly know this: a computer can scan an image of a person and print out the personal details of that person within nanoseconds. In fact, some cameras are fitted with facial recognition software that can provide the name of a person real-time on top of his or her head.

After all, if you’d remember, a while back, when we posted an image of a few people on Facebook, Facebook would sometimes know who these people are and ask if you would like to tag them.

I know it’s scary, but it’s not a new technology: it’s rather old.

Well, so what?

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10-Year-Challenge: A System for Computers to Mine Data & Improve AI Performance?

It all started with Kate O’Neill, a writer from Wired, suggesting that the viral challenge is used to collect data and “train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition”.

Since facial recognition is an old technology, this data could provide AI sufficient information on how to detect age progression.

Say if I’ve an image of me 10 years ago—it’s hard to recognize how I look like now. But with the data mined from the 10-Year-Challenge, the computer could compute how I’ll look like based on the data they’ve mined from the challenge, and create an image of how I would look like now or even 20 years later.

Scary? Don’t be. Facebook has even filed a patent on a technology that can predict where you’ll go tomorrow, so this shouldn’t be alarming.

Of course people started pointing finger at Facebook, and interestingly, Facebook actually replied with this answer: “This is a user-generated meme that went viral on its own…Facebook did not start this trend, and the meme uses photos that already exist on Facebook. Facebook gains nothing from this meme (besides reminding us of the questionable fashion trends of 2009). As a reminder, Facebook users can choose to turn facial recognition on or off at any time.”

But even if Facebook plays no part in this, the data is out in the open for anyone to mine, though you need millions of images to at least create a system.

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Then Again, These Images are Already Online in my Profile What?!

Yes, they are, but in the 10-Year-Challenge, you’re providing a number for the computer to lock in your age. That’s data that extremely useful, and is not readily available in any of your images.

So if you’re still thinking of going for the 10-Year-Challenge, go ahead: you might be training the next Skynet.

(By the way, you’ll have realised I used the word “computer” in this article to describe the “system”: technically speaking, it’s an “algorithm”, a software that can predict things based on data effectively. The word “computer” is used so you won’t be confused as the word algorithm is a little chim, isn’t it? We Goody Feed mah, must use simple England.)

Here’s what NCMPs are, and what to expect after GE2025:

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George Yang
Email: [email protected]