
Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme–Right? - ColinWright
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-10-year-meme-challenge/
======
flocial
Facebook already has access to a larger repository of photos going back over a
decade and all the years inbetween along with decent face recognition to
create a much bigger dataset than resorting to a hashtag challenge. But I
guess that wouldn't be newsworthy.

~~~
reaperducer
_Facebook already has access to a larger repository of photos going back over
a decade and all the years inbetween along with decent face recognition to
create a much bigger dataset than resorting to a hashtag challenge. But I
guess that wouldn 't be newsworthy._

This was addressed in the article:

 _In various versions of the meme, people were instructed to post their first
profile picture alongside their current profile picture, or a picture from 10
years ago alongside their current profile picture. So, yes: These profile
pictures exist, they’ve got upload time stamps, many people have a lot of
them, and for the most part they’re publicly accessible.

But let's play out this idea.

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.

...

In other words, it would help if you had a clean, simple, helpfully labeled
set of then-and-now photos._

~~~
Kylekramer
It tries and fails to address it. I could barely count the number of zeros I
would have to put in front of the 1 in the percentage of Facebook's photo data
this meme covers. And a good portion of their dataset will have EXIF
timestamps. Training an algorithm on the meme only would be insane waste of
their data set.

~~~
bbrian
> their dataset will have EXIF timestamps

It used to be the case (still is?) that the dates on uploaded photos weren't
applied to the photo album. I remember having to go through holiday snaps and
change the date on each from the upload date to the actual date. The images
were also resized down from what was uploaded.

So, if they have the originals with the full EXIF data, I'd like to be able to
use that for my old photos!

~~~
bigbugbag
Chances are they have and you won't be able to use them.

Why would it be so ? Because it profits facebook which is the only reason
facebook exists. It profits them to have original with EXIF for data mining
and you gave them permission to do so while also giving them the data, and it
profits them to not make them available to you to save on bandwidth and
processing costs.

~~~
Setepenre
eh, I think not. There is a reason why they resize the photos. To save space.
Even at facebook scale the amount of space they save by doing this must be
enormous.

Additionally, images used in AI are usually scaled down a lot more, 224x224
for something like resnet50. which means that they do not need your high
quality original and the smaller one they generated are fine.

------
chollida1
[https://globalnews.ca/news/4855500/facebook-10-year-
challeng...](https://globalnews.ca/news/4855500/facebook-10-year-challenge-
facial-recognition/)

[https://twitter.com/facebook/status/1085675097766031360?ref_...](https://twitter.com/facebook/status/1085675097766031360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1085675097766031360&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fglobalnews.ca%2Fnews%2F4855500%2Ffacebook-10-year-
challenge-facial-recognition%2F)

and rebuttal.

I know that Facebook's actions mean that it no longer deserves the benefit of
the doubt but this seems like a non story that someone really wants to be a
story.

Thinking about it lest say 10,000 people respond, is that even enough data to
move the needle? Which photo do you use for the old vs recent? There is alot
of cleanup that manually needs to be done for this to be a decent data set.
Basic common sense says this is a non story.

I did my post undergrad research in 2000 in neural nets and the data sets were
our biggest limiting factor, second was computation time. 10,000 data points
was a huge set back then and still wasn't enough for most tasks.

~~~
opless
10,000 ?

It's probably many many more times that about three times the magnitude.

It might be a bit of a noisy dataset now that it's a meme.

------
thatguyagain
This is just stupid. Even if Facebook wanted to do something like this, they
have the data. Millions and millions of photos are already time stamped.

~~~
0xfffff
not stupid, just good critical thinking. most people are too naive when using
facebook as the past shows.

------
crsmithdev
"My flippant tweet began to pick up traction. My intent wasn't to claim that
the meme is inherently dangerous."

He spun an offhand comment into full-on opinion manipulation, because we're
now reading his article on the topic that not only has a clickbait headline,
it seems to imply there's something more to the story, when in fact there
isn't.

So now we've got all this digital ink spilled on the (entirely hypothetical)
topic, and plenty of eyeballs buying it with their attention. But all of it is
vapor, even at the admission of the authors.

~~~
warp_factor
The issue with internet nowadays to be honest. As soon as you got a bit of
traction with a tweet or with a blog post people try to milk it in order to
market themselves or other narcissistic interests.

~~~
porpoisely
It's not the internet. It's media in general. They need to create an
artificial story to make a profit. Now that the internet is a profit making
center, the media and its tactic has found a welcome home in the internet.

Hence the "arctic blast" about to "ravage the east coast". Or as someone who
has lived in the northeast, just winter. Or any other superlative clickbait.
Everything is a crisis, everything is a disaster.

------
40acres
Facebook and Google's facial recognition software is so advanced that they
have no real use for photos of people explicitly tagged 10 years apart.

Google Photos has been able to track my goddaughter from literally her first
photo (when she looked like an alien) to now (5 years later), with about 2
photos per year.

The subtle point here is that people have became so suspicious of these
platforms that everything they do is observed with a sharper eye on privacy,
speaking of which... I wonder how Portal is doing?

------
colordrops
A funny trend I've been seeing is posts from /r/conspiracy being mined by
journalists for their stories. This exact idea was posted a few days ago to
Reddit, and is not this tech writer's idea.

~~~
tw1010
I don't believe that for a second, it totally sounds like a conspiracy.

~~~
praneshp
If you were going for a joke, nice one!

If serious, I can confirm that I saw this on reddit a few days ago too.

~~~
burk96
I saw it as well, honestly I think journalists (the kind that are closer to
glorified bloggers) have been doing this for quite awhile though. I can't
remember what site it was for sure, maybe cracked, but I remember looking at
the recent articles and it looked like a tl;dr of some of the top reddit posts
of the week.

~~~
colordrops
I've definitely noticed that with Cracked.

------
tsumnia
This research has been in existence for over a decade[1]. Clearly this would
be a valuable dataset, but as others have mentioned, Facebook has probably the
most valuable dataset. Realistically, the biggest hurdle in modelling aging is
in children. The bones/muscles/everything are so elastic that it makes it
difficult to accurately predict how they will look. The primary use for this
tech has been for catching high-valued individuals that have gone in hiding or
children kidnapped into human trafficking (hence the focus on modeling child
face growth).

This entire thing sounds more like someone made a joke about "Big Brother
always watching" and people without a real understanding of what's possible
freaked out when they realized it is.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-
science/can-y...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/can-
your-face-reveal-how-long-youll-live-new-technology-may-provide-the-
answer/2014/07/02/640bacb4-f748-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html?utm_term=.1b3abfe183cd)

------
tw1010
Imagine the irony if that _wasnt 't_ the intent, but articles like this have
now placed the idea in the heads of facebook engineers.

------
feelix
This is idle speculation from somebody who has no idea what they're talking
about. Because it was published on Wired it has gone viral.

It's just technical enough that most people who don't have a clue think that
it might be right so they spread it.

Anyone who knows about data processing, programming, or AI knows that it's a
very stupid idea due to easy-to-implement fault tolerance (such as random
dropout) in machine learning models.

------
jamespetercook
This seems more likely to be a marketing move to me than a covert request for
AI training data. They’re struggling with engagement, so they seeded the 10
Year Challenge causing users to invoke the powerful emotion of nostalgia, made
easy thanks to Facebook keeping all of your photos safe ;)

------
justapassenger
Amount of non-stories about Facebook is getting boring.

------
rzzzt
Can you think of other challenges from the past that might be good for
training neural networks?

Also, is it hard to figure out the origins of a meme? Lots of them are
categorized and researched pretty well already.

------
baxtr
This is saying a lot about what people think of Facebook these days. I don’t
believe that FB wants to gather data here. This is probably an idea coming
from their marketing department. But hey, why would you not think they’re evil
after everything they’ve done?

------
ozgurozkan
People above 18 don’t have very different face biometrics between 18 and 118
years old.

------
itchyjunk
Maybe it's not the data in the meme but studying how memes spread and how well
you can predict it?

------
oth001
Exactly what I thought when I first saw this. Glad to see somebody wrote about
it.

------
kerng
What I like about this tweet is that society starts changing and realizing
what possible things could be done with information that is shared. Good to
see more critical thinking evolve when it comes to social media.

------
ngcc_hk
How about you have 1.3+ billion subject?

