Mubasher: As usual in our modern high-tech era, a new trend emerged on social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram.
The new trend, 10-year challenge, requires users to upload their 10-year old images to be compared to their current images.
The new trend seems like a harmless call to a fun activity to share personal images among friends; however, some sceptics thought the opposite.
They claimed that the challenge was launched by Facebook to collect people’s data, in order to improve a face-recognition artificial intelligent system.
“Let’s say you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on ageing. What would do? Maybe start a meme like #10yearchallenge,” Wired’s editor Nicholas Thompson tweeted.
The Facebook denies those allegations, asserting that it was not responsible for the new trend.
“The 10-year challenge is a user-generated meme that started on its own, without our involvement. It is evidence of the fun people have on Facebook, and that is it,” a spokesperson said.
But the sceptics dismissed that statement, mentioning the major company’s previous privacy scandals.
These controversies include the scandal of Cambridge Analytica on the Russians attempts to use Facebook to influence the 2016 US presidential election.