Last year when Instagram launched its questions, the Stories on the platform were completely filled with the ‘Ask me anything’ card. While this was indeed harmless, internet challenges also included the famous ALS ice-bucket challenge and the KiKi challenge that gained a lot of popularity last year. The latter, particularly, was quite dangerous too. And the latest challenge to hit Facebook and Instagram is the #10yearchallenge. For those unaware, the challenge requires people to post their current pictures along with their photos from ten years back. This challenge appears to be harmless. But on second thought, you may realise that this internet trend is deceptive and it may not be as it seems.
You may be thinking that how can your picture from ten years back prove to be dangerous to you in any way? But remember that you will be either share this picture on Facebook or on Instagram, which is also owned by the social networking giant. We are assuming this because Twitter is not really a place where people share photos, rather the microblogging website and app are meant for ideas. And Facebook does not have a very clean history with people’s data. Since last year, the social networking major has found itself in one controversy or the other involving data leaks. When you share a picture from 10 years back on the platform along with a newer photograph, you are basically providing Facebook with what can be termed as a goldmine of data. Technology companies are now working on facial recognition software and are training AI systems. So this data involving both your pictures can prove to be of great importance to these companies. Using this data, these systems may also be able to determine how a person ages and then go on to predict what we will look like in the years to come. The data may also be used for targeted advertising for various products. Although this may not seem like a dangerous thing at all, the trouble is that all this may happen without the users being informed. So somewhere, it is a breach of privacy. Some may say that we can’t use the term privacy and internet together in the same sentence, however, most social media companies claim that they have been working to enhance privacy and transparency on their platforms, so ideally users should be informed before their data is used for anything else by the platform or by any third-party apps. For the latest gadget and tech news, and gadget reviews, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. For newest tech & gadget videos subscribe to our YouTube Channel.
