Here’s Why One Expert Says You Should Avoid Facebook’s ’10-Year-Challenge’

Some of life's changes that the COVID-19 pandemic hath wrought will almost certainly stay with us when it eventually, thankfully comes to an end.

LIFE CHANGES FROM THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Working from home is a big one. How many folks, after being forced to set up shop in the living room, realized they could have ALWAYS done their jobs from home and then continued to do so after they got the green light to return to the office? Why drive all the way into work for a meeting when you can use Zoom? Yes, we are all beyond exhausted with this pandemic but it DID open our eyes to conveniences that were always in front of us.

What about Facebook games and interaction? Certainly, on the relevance scale, it's at the other end of the spectrum from working remotely. But warnings have emerged over the last couple of years about answering questions that are part of such games.

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THE RISKS OF FACEBOOK GAMES AND QUIZZES

You know the ones I mean. They ask us who our favorite teacher was; the make and model of the car we used to take our first driver's test; the names of the streets on which we lived when we were born. They're fun exercises but they ARE awfully revealing. Even those games you can click on that tell you things like "tell me the number of triangles you see in the image and I'll tell you whether or not you're a narcissist" are the sorts of things I've seen labeled as risky. (No, I have no idea how geometry has anything to do with narcissism.)

And now we have the Facebook "10-year challenge."

First of all, Facebook has indicated that this is a user-generated exercise and that they did not create it. But since warnings about playing the game have now emerged, it makes me wonder who DID initiate it.

THE POTENTIAL DANGERS OF THE FACEBOOK '10-YEAR CHALLENGE'

In The Lawton Constitution, tech writer Gary Reddin warns that participation in the "10-year challenge" could provide information to outside parties who are greatly skilled in the art of subterfuge. Now I totally understood the risk of posting the names of people, places, or pets that might also be answers to security questions on other websites, but I couldn't figure out how side-by-side images that are (supposedly) ten years apart could be a danger.

Reddin acknowledges that our photos are already on our Facebook pages but goes on to say that posting images next to each other that are a decade apart could make it easier for us to fall victim to "social engineering attempts."

An analogy he provides breaks it down into language we can all understand.

[SOURCE: WGAL-Lancaster]