Facebook’s facial recognition used to help find missing people in WhiteGrey campaign
Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN) has launched an ‘Invisible Friends’ campaign which aims to use Facebook’s facial recognition tagging technology to help locate missing people.
Created by WPP’s WhiteGrey, the campaign uses Facebook’s inbuilt tagging capabilities to search for missing people in photos, even if they appear in the background of an image.

An example of the Invisible Friends Facebook page
Two words – Cambridge Analytica
Nobody is going to share their data in this way. Poorly timed.
So many bad ideas in one bad idea.
1. Cambridge Analytica. So an external organisation is going to get permission to harvest everything about me and my friends list. Despite having no privacy policy published on their website, and no permission to actually use FB data in this way.
2. Blind faith that FB will find people in the background and then actually notify the missing persons friends and family.. can you imagine being notified that your missing brother is in someone’s background photo from 2007? And that helps how exactly?