Facebook has denied it’s 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.
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 Wired 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.
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 (eg, 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.”
“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.
“Its evidence of the fun people have on Facebook and that’s it.”
In a separate comment, Facebook said it “gains nothing from this meme” and reminded users they can turn off facial recognition at any time.