Possible dangers of the 10years challenge.

THE POSSIBLE DANGERS OF THE #10YEARCHALLENGE (READ AND SHARE)! About a week ago, a meme popularly known as #10yearchallenge rocked the Social media. Apparently, it's a challenge which involves people posting up then-and-now pictures of themselves from 2009 and 2019 (from 10 years ago). In some cases — especially celebrities — it’s a way of bragging about how they haven’t aged. Others show signs of what nature can do to a human over the course of a decade. As recorded, the meme started when a meteorologist, Damon Lane (an American with about 114k followers) posted his (then-and-now) photos side by side, and boasting of his achievements; consequently, many of his followers started sharing the photos and began to create theirs, and within 24hours, it went viral on the social media. While it appears interesting to make a throwback of oneself some years back with a hashtag (which is not bad), it becomes also pertinent to think about its implications, since it involves the internet where human data could easily be hacked, doctored or manipulated. I remembered having made a photo comparison of me 2 days BEFORE the challenge broke out. With the advent of the challenge and way and manner it was carried out, I consequently deleted my post so as not to be confused with the #10yearchallenge. Besides, many of my friends were on my neck that I should partake in the challenge which I quietly ignored due to the little doubts I had about it. My doubts about the #10yearchallenge concretized when it was displayed on “BOM DIA BRASIL”, the possible dangers involved. “Bom Dia Brasil” ("Good Morning Brazil") is a Brazilian television NEWS program on Rede Globo (Globe Network or simply “Globo”, a Brazilian free-to-air television network). In the NEWS, experts revealed that hackers could use your pictures to hack facial recognition. How is this possible? There is a facial recognition software and other algorithms to compare my looks from a decade ago until now, it could easily do that because it has access to the photos I’ve posted or am tagged in, including the dates they were posted. To explain this better, let me use the analogy of the arithmetic progression of numbers, which we all studied in Mathematics. If I post 1_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 10 and ask you to find the missing numbers, your human intelligence would quickly reveal to you that 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 are the missing numbers; consequently, I could also use this progression to arrive at the number 20 (which is ten dots away). Similarly, this facial recognition software is an intelligence machine, which is capable of learning how we have developed over the course of 10 years and possibly predict how we would most probably look like in the next 10 years; and since our world today is being "ruled" by technology, one’s privacy could easily be hacked and impersonated in the nearest future, this could lead to loss of valuables and resources. In this regard, the more data you share, the more you become a target. It even becomes alarming as my fellow Nigerians took the lead by making not only #10yearchallenge but several memes of 5, 7, 12, 15, 20yearchallenge photos… Laughable, isn’t it? Well, as stated earlier, it is not bad, neither has your account been hacked yet; however, you could be placing yourself at a higher risk of being hacked and being victimized in the future. The bitter truth is that we all on Facebook are potential targets since we’ve got lots of our photos, years back on our respective Timelines; nevertheless, the ones that are easily vulnerable are the ones that participated in the challenge, for they could be easily detected by the hashtag or the keywords. For instance, if you type “10 years challenge” in the search bar of your Facebook page, you would easily detect those who have participated in this challenge; this could easily be done by hackers (who do not have the time to visit people’s timeline individually) and they might easily get a host of unlucky victims. I believe that we’re already familiar with our smartphones’ method of unlocking itself using our face or fingerprint? This is exactly the logic. Our face/fingerprint is the most individual piece of personal ID that we have, so we should be more careful about setting clues for hackers to forge it. After being enlightened by the NEWS, I made further research yesterday and discovered that other American I.T experts shared similar views. I happened to delve into a “Wired opinion piece” by Kate O'Neill who also explored the issues and risks that can come with memes and social games, such as the 10-year challenge. She said: "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". Wired's editor, Nicholas Thompson, also tweeted the article, adding, "Let's say you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on aging. What would you do? Maybe start a meme like #10yearchallenge". Therefore, the broader message is that we need to approach our interactions with technology mindful of the data we generate and how it can be used at scale. Dear friends, we need to know where Technology is leading us to, it appears to be an “easy life”, but then, it could be very risky. Kindly share this message… © Rev. Fr. Chinaka Justin Mbaeri, OSJ