By Facebook is one of many companies that has been using facial recognition technology for years. Is one meme going to make a difference? The 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.
But one post went viral without featuring any side-by-side photos at all. It was written by author Kate O’Neill. “Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram,” she wrote in a tweet last week. “Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition.”
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. She expanded on her thoughts in a widely shared article in Wired.
“I wondered about why this particular thought, in this particular moment, generated so much traction,” O’Neill said on Friday, adding that she was not trying to stoke any panic.
Experts said the photos uploaded for the #10YearChallenge were drops in a very, very big bucket of data that Facebook has been collecting for years.
“We have an awful lot of data that we’re sharing all the time, and companies are collecting it and using it in various ways,” O’Neill said.
Supporters of facial recognition technologies said they can be indispensable for catching criminals or finding missing people. But critics warned that they can enable mass surveillance or have unintended effects that we can’t yet fully fathom.
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. But she added that Facebook already has billions of photographs on its platform, and people should be wary of any company being in possession of such a large trove of biometric data.
“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, pointing to another form of biometric data, DNA, which is increasingly being used by law enforcement to track down suspects — something many people might not have anticipated when they volunteered saliva in exchange for help tracing their ancestral roots.
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