Facebook’s ‘10 year challenge’ : Fun challenge or a Data mining trick?

You might be wondering what’s up with all these photos popping up on all your feed whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp with a BEFORE and an AFTER photo.

Yes, we are referring to this viral challenge that had captured all the feeds of the most popular social media websites and apps- ’10 year challenge’

Even though this sounds like a fun challenge with no repercussions whatsoever, it indeed does have some other motives according to the experts.

“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 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,” said  Kate O’Neill, a writer for Wired.

Facebook however, has a different stance on this and claim that they had no benefit from this challenge going viral.

"This is a user-generated meme that went viral on its own. Facebook did not start this trend, and the meme uses photos that already exist on Facebook," the company said. "Facebook gains nothing from this meme (besides reminding us of the questionable fashion trends of 2009). As a reminder, Facebook users can choose to turn facial recognition on or off at any time."