A new alliance of non-profit organizations dedicated to finding missing persons is planning an innovative use of facial recognition to locate people across Europe and Latin America.
The International Network of Associations of Disappeared Persons (RIAPD) aims to create a network of global volunteers who will match a database of missing persons with images stored on their smartphones.
According to the RIAPD, citizens who want to participate in the search will join a Google Photos album with pictures of missing people. Using the facial recognition system natively installed on their smartphones, they can then identify if a missing person appears randomly in their photo albums.
The RIAPD Alliance was launched in July by nine NGOs from Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru. For the next two years, RIAPD will be coordinated by the Spain-based organization SOSDesaparecidos, which first launched the facial recognition initiative in March.
“We were looking for a simple solution so that people could work together with little effort and so that any association in the world could use the same method and help us with international enforced disappearances,” Joaquín Amills, president of SOSDesaparecidos, told the Spanish investigative journalism portal Elcierre Digital.
From September, other organizations from the European Union will join the alliance. The organization aims to share digital tools and working methods and encourage international collaboration, says Amills, adding that the project will protect the volunteers’ privacy.
“RIAPD is not only a tool for disappeared persons and their families, but also a framework for working with different police forces and government agencies in each country,” says Amills.
In many countries, including South Africa, Nepal, Pakistan and Turkey, biometric systems are used to identify uncollected bodies or missing persons. Last month, authorities in Mexico announced they have been using a voting biometrics database to identify thousands of missing people over the past several years.
Article Topics
biometric identification | Biometrics | Face Recognition | Latin America | missing persons | RIAPD
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