The days of searching for missing persons with posters, billboards and milk cartons might be numbered, with millions of Facebook photos shaping as a potential key to reuniting families with lost loved ones.
The Invisible Friends campaign, a world-first initiative launched on Monday, urges global users to 'friend' the profiles of 10 missing people on the chance a facial scan finds them lurking in the background of their online photos and videos.
Befriending these profiles will allow the social network's facial recognition software, which claims to operate at a 98 per cent accuracy rate, to trawl through posted images for an auto-tag match.
The Victorian-based Missing Persons Advocacy Network, will then be notified of a possible match.
"Invisible Friends is an ingenious way to put artificial intelligence to work for a good cause, and carry out a task humans simply aren't capable of," network founder and director Loren O'Keeffe said in a statement.
The proxy profiles are for nine missing Australians and one missing Brit, who disappeared between 1991 and 2016.
To avoid tracking down people that don't want to be found, the profiles created only relate to cases where an active police report exists.
It is estimated each missing person's potential reach spans 1.5 million people based on Facebook's limit of a maximum 5000 friends.
"This simple, creative idea has such immense potential because of it's immediate, global reach," said Anthony Moss, creative director of WhiteGREY which developed the campaign.
