LATEST NEWS

The online craze for posting portrait photos from today and 10 years ago may seem harmless, but facial recognition software makes it sinister

Have you done the #10YearChallenge? It’s the latest internet craze and involves posting a picture of yourself from 2009 next to a picture of yourself in 2019. I’m not exactly sure why that’s a challenge, but there you go.

While this may seem like just another silly meme, some have asked whether it could have a more sinister side. Kate O’Neill, a tech journalist, half-jokingly suggested on Twitter that the data could be used to train facial recognition algorithms and make them better at predicting age progression. Her tweet went viral and theories started to swirl that perhaps the trend wasn’t so much a challenge, but a conspiracy, executed by Facebook. It wouldn’t be the first time that data collection has been disguised as an innocuous social game. Cambridge Analytica covertly used a personality quiz to get insights into people’s political leanings.

Continue reading...

from US news | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2T3OeVy