Could the #10YearChallenge Really Improve Facial Recognition Tech?

Over the past week, the #2009vs2019 meme challenge, alternately known as the #10yearchallenge and #HowHardDidAgeHitYou, has become the latest social media trend ripe for think piece fodder. While the challenge inspired a host of discussions about social media narcissism and gendered norms, author and consultant Kate O'Neill put her own spin on the meme in a tweet raising the privacy implications of posting age-separated photos of oneself on Facebook. The post generated enough buzz and discussion on Twitter that O'Neill expanded it into an article in Wired, in which she argued that Facebook or another data-hungry entity could exploit the meme to train facial recognition algorithms to better handle age-related characteristics and age progression predictions. She noted that the clear labeling of the year in which the pictures were taken, along with the volume of pictures explicitly age-separated by a set amount of time, could be quite valuable to a company like Facebook. "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," O'Neill wrote.