Facebook Launches ‘Safety Check’ Tool to Let Friends Know You’re Safe When Disaster Hits
When a major disaster strikes, whether natural or human-made, many folk with loved ones in the affected area more often than not turn to social media to check that they’re OK.
With that in mind, Facebook on Wednesday rolled out Safety Check, a new tool that lets users in a disaster area quickly and easily send out notifications to let family and friends know they’re safe.
So how does it work?
If a natural disaster strikes in your area, you’ll receive a notification from Facebook asking if you’re all right. Safety Check determines your location by looking at the place you’ve listed in your profile, your last location if you’ve opted in to Nearby Friends, or the area where you’re using the Internet.
Introducing Safety Check from Facebook on Vimeo.
If you’re safe, you simply hit the “I’m safe” button at which point a notification and News Feed story is fired off to your friends.
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Using it the other way, if you have friends in a disaster zone and have Safety Check activated, you’ll receive their notifications once they send them out. Click on the notification and you’ll be taken to a Safety Check bookmark where you’ll find any future updates from the same person.
The idea for Safety Check grew out of the Disaster Message Board created by Facebook engineers in Japan following the devastating quake and tsunami that hit the northeast of the country in 2011.
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The disaster, which the Red Cross said affected an estimated 12.5 million people, provided developers and engineers with useful data on how people, including relief organizations and first responders, use the Web and social media in times of crisis. This research went toward the creation of Safety Check, a tool Facebook hopes users will find indispensable should they be unfortunate enough to be caught up in a calamitous event.
Safety Check is available now to all of Facebook’s 1.3 billion members and works on Android, iOS, feature phones, and the desktop website.
Many tech firms have been looking at ways to help the population in times of crisis. Google, for example, launched Public Alerts in 2012, while Twitter rolled out Twitter Alerts a year later. The pair teamed up earlier this year to allow Google to automatically include tweets from disaster-hit areas into its own emergency service.
