#10YearChallenge: Was this a sly ploy to train a robust age-invariant face recognition system?
Photos posted voluntarily in the public domain are vulnerable to be harvested by third parties.
By ET Bureau |
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By Rohan Abraham
Cybersecurity experts talk about how photos on social media can be harvested by third parties to build user database and face-recognition systems.
Netizens be warned. Over the past month, social media has been aswarm with people posting charitable then-and-now photos to showcase how they have aged in a decade. But online activities such as the #10YearChallenge could be fraught with risk. ETPanache reached out to cybersecurity experts on the perils of leaving a digital trail of personal photographs on the internet.
Face value “You may think you were sharing your photograph just with your friends and loved ones, whereas it may end up in the database of a large corporation,” says Graham Cluley, a winner of the EU Security Blogger Awards, in an email.
“Social media companies and online retailers are in the business of monetising users’ data. By selling demographics data, advertisers can target specific users for their products,” says Anil K Jain of Michigan State University.
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Jain adds that photos posted voluntarily in the public domain are vulnerable to be harvested by third parties, although it is illegal to create bots to scrape photos from social media. Facebook boasts of 2.3 billion active users, giving it a sizeable data set to train facial recognition algorithms.
Image bank Facebook has been using this technology for self-tagging photos since 2010. “Having a large database consisting of a pair of face photos for the same subject separated by a 10-year time gap can indeed be utilised to train a robust age-invariant face recognition system,” says Jain.
The social media giant, however, confirms that face recognition systems are not tracking, studying, or ‘aware’ of this meme nor are such photos being treated differently from others. “We don’t process the content of images to target ads,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
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Personalised ads Unlike Facebook, which has a sizable trove of images, Twitter has a smaller pool of personal photos. When asked about ads based on users’ interactions on its platform, a spokesperson for Twitter said, “We work with partners to bring more useful and interesting advertising content through interest-based advertising.”
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For example, if a chocolate brand wants to advertise a Valentine’s Day special on Twitter, the platform can match user accounts with previous search behaviour to sell targeted ads. Advertisers can further benefit if AI can divide users into different age groups. Chocolate brands will possibly focus on young adults who are more likely to favour their food with high sugar content.
AI-based face filter Matthew Erickson, executive director of the Digital Privacy Alliance, downplays the specific impact of the #10YearChallenge on Facebook’s leveraging the data generated by the meme to finetune their pattern recognition algorithms. “However, other social media platforms that may not have this extensive tagged dataset of images may be able to leverage this,” he says.
Legality While advertisers will benefit from selling targeted campaigns to users, governments too could profit from the deluge of data voluntarily disclosed as a part of the #10YearChallenge. “In the United States, if the government can purchase information from a third party, it is not covered by the Fourth Amendment. This has led to significant increases in data available to the government that previously would have required a warrant,” Erickson says . India’s draft data protection Bill is yet to be tabled in the Parliament.
Facebook, Twitter Instagram: Tips & Tricks To Keep Social Media Private
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It seems counter intuitive – after all, social media helps you share your opinions and speak to a larger audience. But thanks to rampant identity theft and online stalking, there is a solid argument to be made to target your social posts instead of keeping them public. Karan Bajaj shows you how.
It seems counter intuitive – after all, social media helps you share your opinions and speak to a larger audience. But thanks to rampant identity theft and online stalking, there is a solid argument ..
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Facebook has a dedicated section for privacy settings and tools (accessible in the Settings menu). In this section, you can choose who can see your future activity. For privacy, select Friends instead of Public. Also on the same page, you get the option to limit accessibility of your existing posts on the social network to only friends instead of everyone. You can also choose individual settings for items such as friend requests, email addresses access, phone number access and who can see your friends list. To step up your privacy, switch all these settings to ‘Friends Only’. We also recommend switching off access to search engines outside of Facebook.
Facebook has a dedicated section for privacy settings and tools (accessible in the Settings menu). In this section, you can choose who can see your future activity. For privacy, select Friends instea..
Read More
By default, all the information in your profile is in the public domain. To change this, click on your profile picture on the top bar to view your profile. On this page, you can view all the information available to anyone who opens your profile page. Click the edit button (the small pencil icon) that appears inside the intro box and you can then customize your info. We recommend switching off all the items you want to keep private from prying eyes.
By default, all the information in your profile is in the public domain. To change this, click on your profile picture on the top bar to view your profile. On this page, you can view all the informat..
Read More
Many regular Facebook users tend to upload a lot of photos to share with friends and family. However, you don’t want everyone who visits your profile to have access to all these memories either. One way to hide them is to delete them from Facebook after a few months. The other way is to edit the privacy settings for each photo album. Click on Photos > Albums. For any album that you want to limit access to, click the options button (the three dots on the right corner) on an individual album and choose edit. This will open the privacy settings for the album for which you can select only friends, family or only you.
Many regular Facebook users tend to upload a lot of photos to share with friends and family. However, you don’t want everyone who visits your profile to have access to all these memories either. One ..
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Quite like Instagram, Twitter lets you hide your tweets from the world — this means they’ll only be visible to your existing followers and won’t show up in searches. You will also have to individually approve new followers from that point forward. To do this, go to the ‘Settings and Privacy’ section and look for ‘Privacy and Safety’. Here, you can switch-on the feature marked ‘Protect your Tweets’.
Quite like Instagram, Twitter lets you hide your tweets from the world — this means they’ll only be visible to your existing followers and won’t show up in searches. You will also have to individuall..
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One of the nicest privacy features on Twitter is that it lets you control how people can look you up on Twitter. In Settings, look for a section on Discoverability — here you can choose if other users can find you on Twitter using your email address or phone number. You can also view and manage any contacts you have uploaded to Twitter from your smartphone or choose to remove uploaded data from your account altogether.
One of the nicest privacy features on Twitter is that it lets you control how people can look you up on Twitter. In Settings, look for a section on Discoverability — here you can choose if other user..
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This is the easiest method to prevent access to your Instagram posts and stories. In the Instagram app on your phone, open settings > Privacy and Security. You will see the option for Account Privacy here which gives you the option to switch to a private account. Once enabled, only people that are following you will be able to see your posts. Any new followers will have to be approved by you individually. You should do this if you’re not interested in growing your followers and want to share with a group of people only.
This is the easiest method to prevent access to your Instagram posts and stories. In the Instagram app on your phone, open settings > Privacy and Security. You will see the option for Account Privacy..
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Chances are that you have linked your Facebook profile to your Instagram account — either by choice or by using a Facebook account to login to Instagram. What happens in this scenario is that when anyone visits your Facebook profile, it shows them that you are also available on Instagram. To avoid this, head to Settings in your Instagram app, tap on Account > Linked Accounts > Facebook and select ‘Unlink Account’.
Chances are that you have linked your Facebook profile to your Instagram account — either by choice or by using a Facebook account to login to Instagram. What happens in this scenario is that when an..
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Even with your account set to private, a friend can share your story to their timeline and it would then become public through their feed. To stop this from happening, you can control how your Instagram stories can be seen and shared. In Settings, go to Privacy and Security > Story Controls. Here, you can switch off the option that lets people share your story. You can create a blacklist to hide your story from certain people, choose who can reply to your story (everyone, people you follow or no one) and there are also options to prevent saving story posts to the Instagram archive.
Even with your account set to private, a friend can share your story to their timeline and it would then become public through their feed. To stop this from happening, you can control how your Instag..
