Facebook group unites owner with lost camera

The creator of a popular network group, set up to discover the owner of a lost camera, has finally achieved his objective.

Danny Cameron built the group, entitled “Needle in a Haystack”, to track down the owner of a camera he found whilst holidaying on the Greek island of Mykonos.

The Facebook group, started on October 17th of this year, started out with only 60 members, but by October 30th, around 18,000 people had joined the group and, on November 2nd, Cameron recorded over 235,000 members.

Cameron said, “I couldn’t have done it without these 235,000 other people. The outcome of it all, I believe, is that I have given people encouragement that honesty still exists in the world, and so hopefully I have inspired the members to be more considerate in their daily lives”.

He spoke of his initial discovery of the now-famous camera saying, “While waiting at a bus stop, a silver glimmer caught the corner of my eye. I climbed down and retrieved a camera that must have fallen from someone’s bag the night before”.

After flicking through the photos, he spent the day wandering around the small town and looking for the owner among the tourists.

With no luck in his search, Cameron, on his return home to Australia, invited his friends to the Facebook group, with the theory that the whole world could be reached through the theory of the “six degrees of separation”.

“While using Facebook”, he said, “I have seen groups grow to mammoth numbers of members, so I knew the potential the medium has to reach around the world. Figuring anyone with a digital camera is likely to be an online user, I thought the chances might be reduced to a remote possibility of finding the owner”.

His efforts eventually paid off and, on the morning of November 3rd, Cameron received word from a number of people that appeared in one of the photos. According to Cameron, “They were amazed at the human chain that had been formed to track them down”.

The female owner of the camera is from a coastal town in France and speaks little English. Cameron sent the camera back to her by registered post last week.