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Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Meme Could Train Facial Recognition Algorithms On Age Progression, Age Recognition (wired.com)
If you've spent any time on social media lately, you've probably noticed a trend where users are posting their then-and-now profile pictures, mostly from 10 years ago and this year. While this "10 Year Challenge" appears harmless, founder of KO Insights and the author of Tech Humanist, Kate O'Neill, says all this data "could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition." She adds: "It's worth considering the depth and breadth of the personal data we share without reservations." From the report: 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 data set with lots of people's pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart -- say, 10 years. Sure, you could mine Facebook for profile pictures and look at posting dates or EXIF data. But that whole set of profile pictures could end up generating a lot of useless noise. People don't reliably upload pictures in chronological order, and it's not uncommon for users to post pictures of something other than themselves as a profile picture. A quick glance through my Facebook friends' profile pictures shows a friend's dog who just died, several cartoons, word images, abstract patterns, and more. In other words, it would help if you had a clean, simple, helpfully-labeled set of then-and-now photos.
What's more, for the profile pictures on Facebook, the photo posting date wouldn't necessarily match the date that the picture was taken. [...] Through the Facebook meme, most people have been helpfully adding that context back in (e.g. "me in 2008, and me in 2018"), as well as further info, in many cases, about where and how the pic was taken (e.g. "2008 at University of Whatever, taken by Joe; 2018 visiting New City for this year's such-and-such event"). In other words, thanks to this meme, there's now a very large data set of carefully curated photos of people from roughly 10 years ago and now. In closing, Kate says it's not necessarily bad that someone could use your Facebook photos to train a facial recognition algorithm -- it's inevitable. "Still, the broader takeaway here is that we need to approach our interactions with technology mindful of the data we generate and how it can be used at scale."
What's more, for the profile pictures on Facebook, the photo posting date wouldn't necessarily match the date that the picture was taken. [...] Through the Facebook meme, most people have been helpfully adding that context back in (e.g. "me in 2008, and me in 2018"), as well as further info, in many cases, about where and how the pic was taken (e.g. "2008 at University of Whatever, taken by Joe; 2018 visiting New City for this year's such-and-such event"). In other words, thanks to this meme, there's now a very large data set of carefully curated photos of people from roughly 10 years ago and now. In closing, Kate says it's not necessarily bad that someone could use your Facebook photos to train a facial recognition algorithm -- it's inevitable. "Still, the broader takeaway here is that we need to approach our interactions with technology mindful of the data we generate and how it can be used at scale."
Facebook is over 14 years old. They already have a series of photos showing people ageing more than 10 years.
They are evil, untrustworthy and despicable, but this current program is in NO way an additional threat. They do not need to use this data for age regression algorithms, they already have the necessary data.
Stop complaining about people feeding the baby Dragon - it is already fully grown and eating whole herds.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
At this point Facebook has a ton of images of people over quite a long timeframe they can just mine on a whim for any changes over time, without people specifically posting comparison shots.
As for other groups training age changing AI, well I'm not sure why I should really be concerned about that anyway???
I guess the larger message is "any image you post publicly can be used by anyone for anything" but isn't that already obvious.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of course by publicly sharing lies, I mean grossly excessive exaggeration, with humour and relational database poisoning. So for me preferred gender Bungil, preferred pronoun cheeky bastard, preferred web mail server Yandex because and only because it's RUSSIAN (and so I end up in UK and US Russian statistics are mwa hah hah Russian sourced). My likes and dislikes, well being a moody bastard, entirely dependent upon my moods, it could be any thing at any time, like or dislike, depending upon the story I wish to tell at that time.
You 'MUST', absolutely 'MUST', treat the public internet as a fantasy game you play for fun and never, 'NEVER' ever to be taken seriously. The public internet, the place of grossly excessive exaggeration, slander and insults, purposeful offence, silly lies, empty truths, endless distortions of reality, not just about yourself but everything around you, mocking beliefs, creating beliefs, lies about beliefs, if it amuses be mysandrist, misogynist, prejudiced and racist all at the same time.
Work hard at making fun of internet social media, have as much fantasy fun with it as you can and poison those relational databases in every way you can. Invent genders, pronouns, religions, all new 'isms', be an SJF a social justice freak and freak the fuck out of all the brass rod up khyber pass (cockney rhyming slang) types, have them all huffing and puffing, chest pumping and frothing at the mouth and laugh at them, mock them and laugh at them some more.
Take the internet too seriously and you will kill us all, treat it like a joke and a fun fantasy place to play and we will live much more happily, don't be a dick, treat the internet like it is a big ole massive bag of dicks, don't become one of them, mock the fuck out of them (PS equal opportunity, there are just as many dick brained wamen as there are dick brained alpha males (apparently dog boys by inclination), the are less of the 'other gender' dick brains but only because there are lot less 'other genders' but probably a much higher proportion in that particular group, lots of real bitches, which I am sure they would agree with, well the normies amongst them).
Lie all over the public real name based internet, it is what it is for and the only thing it is good for, fuck the public ego strokers, the internet poseurs of no real value, greedy and shallow in equal measure.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Surely it would be unethical for someone to use that data without the rights...
Of course one grants FB the right to reproduce, etcetc when one uploads, so they might be internally training. And one possibly signs the rights to have that picture redistributed to others, so others could possibly buy that data from FB.
But random corps and labs scraping images from Facebook? I'd like to see some hapless lab crumble under the weight of a lawyery magnificent seven for using scraped images in that way. It would be a small victory at least.
....better scare them back into line!
A nation may only have one set of images of an illegal migrant on file.
Years of swapping documents and creating new documents could have obscured the tracking of illegal migrants.
Now governments, police and mil have more digital tools to work with.
CCTV and needed photo ID years later will allow for a more easy way to look back over past attempts by illegal migrants at creating fake ID sets.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
She asks Facebook users to be "mindful of the data we generate"? Facebook users?
I don't see what she proposes as harmful though. Especially not compared to what Facebook already does. Someone should just try it.
Any way you want it thatâ(TM)s the way you need it any way you want it. Wait what?
For fuck's sake, people..
You are both hilarious, and a rebel! It's weird that you don't have any friends in real life and have to come to a technology forum to socially interact.
Sounds good, except....
Half of these 10 years later pics are now memes. Good luck filtering them out.
I've only seen a few that were actually 10 years. Most are more like 7-8 years. You don't know the actual time span.
People are selectively choosing what pictures to compare. There's a lot of bias in what is being chosen.
Filters, filters, filters. 10 years ago they weren't as common, or they were simple instragram-like color filters. Now they are actively distorting the geometry of people's faces, smoothing blemishes, making their eyes subtly larger, etc.
In other words is a bunch of crap data that is totally uncontrolled. Not exactly what you want to be training algorithms on.
Better known as 318230.
My FB photo is a picture of blank white and never changes with time
I completely agree and have been saying this for years. The internet was, and should be treated like the wild west, anything goes. If you have any presence online at all, expect to be flamed/trolled/hacked, and don't feel bad about doing the same to others. Meatspace is the place to be polite and civilised (because of physical proximity you are more easily punished for not being civilised). Don't bring your immature, bedwetting need for niceness to our internet, its not wanted here.
Then the internet became actually important for getting things done (shopping, taxes, finding employment etc) so 'normal' people inexperienced in the 'wild west' nature of the internet had to use it. Unable or unwilling to deal with the reality of the internet, they turned it into the boring, nanny state reality that exists in meatspace in most western countries.
They already have all of your photos with datestamp they were uploaded....
No, seriously, it really is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They need all of these samples to train algorithms to work even despite filters and memes. If it doesn't work on modified images then what good is it? Most pictures are edited or filtered or touched up, and they still need to harvest that data and tag those images. All of this is helping.