Echo is an AI facial recognition model that searches through the web and dark web for missing people. It takes submitted missing person’s reports and creates a unique fingerprint like ID of a person’s face and sends out searches until they find a match.
Many people, primarily young women and girls, who end up missing are victims of sex trafficking, and in the digital age, their abuse is often shared online for profit. From the dark web, forums, and even popular porn sites, this abuse material is hosted due to the amount of content of these sites and lack of pushback.
With Echo, people can submit an official missing persons report and photo and have the program ID the person and search through the web until they find a match..
The name “Echo” comes from the idea of echolocation, the physiological process where an animal emits sounds and then listens to the echoes that bounce off objects to “see” its environment, determine an object’s location, size, texture, and movement. Animals like bats, whales, and some birds use this to find things in low-visibility conditions. It relates to the AI’s behavior, as it sends out “search signals” into data space until they “hit” a match.
