China’s internet giant Baidu recently helped a lost child to find his family after 26 years of separation. The company has vowed to promote and harness its technology in the future to track more lost children in an effort to tackle the country’s human trafficking problem.

Cooperating with Baobeihuijia.com, China’s best-known online platform for finding missing children, Baidu helped 33-year-old FuG ui to locate his family using facial recognition technology that can artificially age any face. Fu, who was born in Chongqing, was abducted in 1990 and later sold in Fujian province. Fu registered with Baobeihuijia.com in 2009, while his family did so in 2017.

“Fu uploaded a picture of himself taken at the age of 10. In the photo provided by his family, he was only 4. That time span is long enough to significantly change a child’s facial features, making it nearly impossible to identify matches by hand,” a Baidu employee told Thepaper.cn.

According to the Xinhua News Agency, Baidu’s facial recognition technology can draw up a short list of potential identities for abducted children from pictures uploaded to the site, and a DNA test later can verify whether or not a given match is correct. Currently, the technology is capable of recognizing human facial features within a time span of 30 years. In the future, it could be developed even further to fight human trafficking.

Due to the traditional preference for male children in Chinese society, which is especially pronounced in rural areas, a dynamic black market still exists for abducted children. Some families who are unable to have biological children are willing to pay large sums of money to buy a child.