Facebook’s ’10 Year Challenge’ is just a harmless meme—right?

Wired:

If you use social media, you’ve probably noticed a trend across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter of people posting their then-and-now profile pictures, mostly from 10 years ago and this year.

In various versions of the meme, people were instructed to post their first profile picture alongside their current profile picture, or a picture from 10 years ago alongside their current profile picture. So, yes: These profile pictures exist, they’ve got upload time stamps, many people have a lot of them, and for the most part they’re publicly accessible.

But let’s play out this idea.

We’ve mentioned often here how we give up way too much data voluntarily. Some of it, like this “challenge”, while seemingly innocent, may actually be sneaky and insidious.