Just in case you thought the Facebook #10YearChallenge was all about sharing your physical and financial improvements, you’re wrong from an online perspective and 100% right on your decade improvements. Well, a new research has revealed that bots in the near future may actually be able to detect your age depending on the outcomes of this current 10-year challenge.
Facebook didn’t have a perfect 2018 with lawsuits hunting down Mark Zuckerberg for some extra explanations about data breaches. However, as time goes on, several bots might be currently on the run redefining the way you use the site and we shall not be surprised to see an age recognition messenger bot in 2019.
Participating and sharing photos in the new challenge is not potentially bad, even when it trains bots on comparing the then and now of appearance of users. The founder of KO Insights Kate O’Neill says all data being shared by social media users can all be mined in a flip of a second and help train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and recognition. Additionally the chatter of personal data could be at stake if the bots prediction is odd.
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). Ideally, you’d want a broad and rigorous data set with lots of people’s pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart — say, 10 years. Sure, you could mine Facebook for profile pictures and look at posting dates or EXIF data. But that whole set of profile pictures could end up generating a lot of useless noise. People don’t reliably upload pictures in chronological order, and it’s not uncommon for users to post pictures of something other than themselves as a profile picture. A quick glance through my Facebook friends’ profile pictures shows a friend’s dog who just died, several cartoons, word images, abstract patterns, and more. In other words, it would help if you had a clean, simple, helpfully-labeled set of then-and-now photos.
What’s more, for the profile pictures on Facebook, the photo posting date wouldn’t necessarily match the date that the picture was taken. […] Through the Facebook meme, most people have been helpfully adding that context back in (e.g. “me in 2008, and me in 2018”), as well as further info, in many cases, about where and how the pic was taken (e.g. “2008 at University of Whatever, taken by Joe; 2018 visiting New City for this year’s such-and-such event”). In other words, thanks to this meme, there’s now a very large data set of carefully curated photos of people from roughly 10 years ago and now
While Facebook now has the #10YearChallenge on its trend list, developers could be eagerly mining this data in private to help build the futuristic bots or simply perfect those we’ve seen with inaccurate results before. Nonetheless, at Techjaja we shall cheat the challenge with a 2013 drop and probably if bots are on the hunt for perfection of facial recognition systems, our prayer could be that this data is kept private to the developers since some users in one way or the other misuse the challenge for selfish gains.
