Is the 7-day black and white photo challenge on Facebook safe?

ByCraig Haley

Whenever viral “challenges” or activities spread on Facebook, we invariably get asked by many of our readers about whether it is safe or not to get involved.

With countless variants of scams operating on the Internet’s largest social networking site at any one time, it’s hard to blame people for being a tad cautious before engaging in a challenge that involves them uploading their own photos to the Internet.

With this 7-day challenge, Facebook users are invited to upload 7 photos over the course of 7 days (so one a day.) All photos have to be black and white, not feature people, have no explanation and must challenge another Facebook users to do the same (helping the challenge spread across Facebook.)


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But is it safe? Has it been started by crooks looking to trick you into compromising your online security or privacy?

For those playing is safe, then don’t worry as the challenge doesn’t appear particularly malicious, providing you follow common sense safety advice that you should follow regardless of what photos you’re uploading.

When uploading photos, your default privacy setting should be set to friends only, so strangers can’t see them. We don’t recommend using the public privacy setting, as a variety of crooks can use your photos against you, even seemingly innocuous ones. For more information on protecting your photos on Facebook, read our post here.

Assuming you’ve done this and strangers can’t see your photos, and you’re not uploading compromising information (like a screenshot of your password, but we’ll give our readers some credit and assume they won’t) there is little reason to see why engaging in this challenge (though we’re not entirely sure why it’s a challenge since it’s not that challenging) shouldn’t put you at risk in anyway.

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