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The 10 Year Challenge, a trending social media meme in which users post photos of themselves from 10 years ago, is raising warnings from tech experts that all signs point to it being a clandestine operation to harvest personal data.

“It would be very, very unlikely for it just to be fun,” said David Murakami Wood, the Queen’s University-based Canada Research Chair in surveillance studies.

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Given the kinds of images being collected, their likely usage would be to train artificial intelligence software on how to recognize human aging.

The theory was first raised in a WIRED editorial by Kate O’Neill, founder of the tech consultancy KO Insights.

“Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics,” she wrote. “Ideally, you’d want a broad and rigorous data set with lots of people’s pictures.”

Best of all, the images posted for the 10 Year Challenge are all spaced precisely 10 years apart, giving a uniform aging benchmark.