If your social media feed was humming with information related to missing persons very recently, then you may have been raked over as part of a determined open source hack.
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But fear not: it's all ethical and transparent.
In what is considered a world first, 356 ethical hackers and investigators in 10 locations around Australia trawled open source data looking for missing people in a contest which is hoped to generate new leads and reunite families.
Having the Australian hackers working with the police is a new development. In similar types of events overseas, police prefer to remain at arm's length.
Linda Cavanagh, the manager of the Canberra Cyber Security Innovation Node, described it the "first large-scale, crowd-sourced open-source intelligence gathering of its kind in Australia for missing persons, and a first for a country to participate simultaneously".
It's in a "capture the flag" format where teams online competed against each other to generate new information on 12 specific missing Australians.
Any new information gleaned was placed before a judging panel and checked for validity, relevance and supporting evidence.
The stronger the lead generated, the higher points earned by the competing teams. Points were tallied up at the end of the day and a top cash prize of $2000 awarded to the most successful team.
Canberra hosted the inaugural event which was live-streamed to Sydney, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Darwin, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth, with a national scoreboard online.
Canadian-based company Trace Labs organises these types of ethical group hacks in the US and Canada, including one at Def Con in Las Vegas, the world's largest and longest-running underground hacking conference.
Trace Labs uses crowd sourcing to pay for what it calls "open source intelligence gathering" on missing persons, collecting, processing and analysing data from a raft of sources such as social media sites, the dark net, CCTV archives, and forums.
Rob Sell, Trace Labs' founder and president, said that Australia had shown itself to be innovative and progressive in what is a developing field of investigation by bringing law enforcement "into the tent" of a hackathon, "not standing on the outside looking in".
There are over 100,000 active missing persons cases open in the US at any one time. Australia has around 2600 active cases.
"We know that about 66 per cent of people that go missing are found or return in the first 24 hours," Mr Sell said.
"About 88 per cent are found or return in the first week. But still leaves that 12 per cent of cases open and unresolved.
"What events like this can do is bring together a collective of people with those really well-developed web searching skillsets.
"Hackers are people who don't look at the world the way that other people do; they don't follow the normal playbook.
"And when you put those unique skills into a competitive environment, you really start to see things happen."
Families and friends will be watching the hackathon outcome with interest.
Will Policarpio's son, Jean, was one of the 12 missing people whose faces, details and circumstances were being searched on Friday.
The quietly spoken father said he looked forward to what may develop and intended to stay right through the day, watching and waiting as he has now for two years.
All leads generated by the hackers will be passed onto the federal police for follow-up via the National Missing Persons Coordination Centre.