The digital age has inspired an environment where every family has an abundance of photos and videos of their children, but are those images enough to help authorities find your child in the event of an emergency?
Over 600,000 people are reported missing in the United States every year, and tens of thousands stay missing for over a year. Reuniting families as quickly as possible is the idea behind My Family ID.
“Child ID, better child ID, is gonna make an impact on the number of missing kids we have each year,” explains Charles Still, a retired Tustin Police Department detective.
Still is the founder of My Family ID, an app created to gather digital fingerprints and a 3D scan of a child or at-risk adult stored exclusively on your phone. But critical information he could have used as a young detective.
“My first day on the job, I had… back then we had files on our desk… I had 66 open cases and half of them were missing runaway kids,” he said while pointing out the challenges police face will searching for missing children or adults.
Lisa Basch is convinced she needed My Family ID.
“You’re never going to want to use it, but God forbid you need to use it, you have it at your fingertips and it’s done.”
Basch said it was important to her that the information remains solely on her phone and is not shared with a third party data base.
She has already encouraged friends to download and use the app knowing that by having it readily available, there’s no delay in sharing it if the situation arises.
“It’s either an email or a screen shot, or a phone call… sent to a WhatsApp, to a text message of an authority, of a friend, a grandparent… anybody. And you have that ability to do that in a second directly from your cell.”
Gathering digital fingerprints takes only seconds, but those prints can be vital in finding a missing person. Especially if the person has been hurt in an accident, or has been taken and is under duress.
Still knows of one case where a child was an adult before being reunited with family… something that could have happened when that person applied for a driver’s license and was fingerprinted at the DMV. Having a proper photograph can be used with AI to help police scan thousands of hours of security footage in seconds.
“The app forces you to take a photograph that is formatted for facial recognition, and I see that as a game changer in identifying someone who’s just walking by,” explains Still.
The one-time cost for the app is $4.99 and is available for Android and iPhones. The peace of mind provided in the event of an emergency is immeasurable.
“We just have to do better. We’ve got to do better at being able to identify children in the field in real time.”
Copyright © 2025 KABC Television, LLC. All rights reserved.
