Last month, tech writer Kate O’Neill sparked a debate online, with a sarcastic tweet speculating that Facebook’s “Ten Year Challenge” was really a ploy by the social media company to fuel it’s facial recognition machine learning algorithms. Her subsequent Wired opinion piece, along with many other articles, hypothesized about the plausibility of the conspiracy, and what kind of data the platform could extract from such a viral campaign.
In the same week, the Pew Research Center released a report showing that 74 percent of Facebook users aren’t aware of how much data the site is collecting about them, to feed their advertising platform. To better understand the phenomenon, this video breaks down what machine learning is, and how Facebook is using it to create detailed profiles of its users’ interests and behavior.
