Invisible Friends

We harnessed Facebook’s new facial recognition and auto tagging technology to search for missing persons. By creating Facebook profiles for the missing and building them a friend network across the world, we created a social search party that scoured the backgrounds of millions of photos and videos posted on Facebook, daily. If a missing person were to appear in the background of an image uploaded to Facebook by anyone in their friend network, the facial recognition tech would identify them and MPAN would be notified. Followed by any appropriate investigation.
Simply put, we asked the world to donate their Facebook friendship to enable advanced AI to search for missing persons.

To hijack Facebook’s facial recognition technology, we created profiles for missing people and populated them with personal information and photos of each individual. Tagging each photo then trained Facebook's facial recognition software on what face to look for. A landing page www.invisiblefriends.com.au was established to explain how the tech and the initiative works, while also providing authenticity to the profiles, that were all just one click away.
Then a large social and PR push aimed to garner as many Facebook friends as possible for each Invisible Friend profile.
The campaign launched in mid April and is ongoing, with missing persons organisations around the world wanting to implement the program in order to bring home some of their missing people.