You've had to have seen it by now. The "ten year challenge" on Facebook. The object is to post your profile picture from 2009 next to your current pic in 2019. It's been HUGE on social media as of late. Everyone seems to be getting in on the action. I personally have not taken the bait. I've never played along with any of copy and paste posts or viral trends to be honest and the more I read about it, I'm pretty happy with that decision.
Experts are now saying that the "challenge" may not be as innocent as it looks. A business professor at New York University who specializes in artificial intelligence says quote "it's presented Facebook with a terrific opportunity to learn, to train their systems to better recognize small changes in how we look as we age."
So, what's the big deal RJ? Well, for one, Facebook could sell the pictures with insurance companies. If you're a decent person I bet it didn't even cross your mind, but a writer for "Wired" says an insurance company could buy the data and use it to hike up their rates on people who appear to be aging faster than others. I truly didn't even think about this one but it makes total sense. Knowing this it sort of makes me want to post a couple pictures from my 18th birthday back to back and pretend they're 10 years apart. The Insurance companies could end up thinking I'm some sort of low risk vampire or something. I suppose the exploitation could be a good thing in that case.
Now, all of this is just speculation and Facebook swears they don't have any evil plans, but then again Facebook says a lot of things. In the end, remember that Facebook and all of social media for that matter are watching everything you do. Your smart TV is LISTENING to you, everywhere you look there's someone behind the curtain looking to exploit any piece of information you innocently share. So, keep that in mind and be careful.