Tbf the brick industry helped indirectly and it just happened to be super helpful. They didn’t perform a mass mining of user data across the whole country or a large region. They had very little data to go off other than someone’s past memory of the material. I’m Facebook would have helped in that way too if it was able to.

However, this is exactly how I’d have hoped Facebook would have responded without some sort of court order for data, they shouldn’t be mining everything at the mere request for help by a law enforcement agency. I get this topic is one where you’d wish there was an exception but exceptions are slippery slopes.

> "He goes: 'Bricks are heavy.' And he said: 'So heavy bricks don't go very far.'"

Move slow, build things.

It helps that the brick industry is already set up to offer this - "brick matching" from photographs is a valuable service for architects, builders, and home improvement firms.