Facebook’s Safety Check-In Feature: Stay in Touch During a Disaster

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Facebook's Safety Check In Feature
Use Facebook's Safety Check feature to make sure your family and friends are safe during a natural disaster.

Whether you’re an everyday Facebook social networking fan, you will appreciate Facebook’s Safety Check-In Feature. The handy feature is helpful amid a natural disaster, terror attack, domestic mass shooting, or similar crisis. In this post, we’ll explore the great value of this feature.

What Is Facebook’s Safety Check-In Feature and Why It’s So Important

First, let’s go a little further back in history. When the Loma Prieta Earthquake hit on October 17, 1989, it shook the entire central coastal California region from San Francisco Bay to Monterey Bay. Also, it rattled all of the communities east of this area for many miles inland. With the third game of the World Series about to start, millions of people were already watching television when the news broke. The nation was horrified to see videos of freeways collapsing and buildings crumbling, many with people inside, played repeatedly.

Immediately, people started trying to contact their family and friends who lived in the region. Still, unfortunately, the phone lines went down, and many stayed down for days, as did the electricity. It was heartbreaking not to know if your loved ones were safe. It was equally frustrating if you were in the region and couldn’t get word back to those you knew would be worried sick about you until they knew you were safe and sound. Amid all the chaos, this was the top priority for most people, but there was nothing they could do. Regular lines of communication were GONE!

Of course, there was no Facebook or social media at the time. Cell phones had been invented, but very few people had them, so there was no such thing as “text messaging.” Rudimentary forms of the email were only used by academics, emergency personnel, government officials, and science nerds — and even among these groups, the usage was limited. Plus, it wasn’t safe to travel the roads to check on people who weren’t in the immediate vicinity, especially with several large aftershocks causing even more damage and injecting even more fear and uncertainty into the population.

Bottom line, if you lived through that event or had family or friends who lived there who you couldn’t get in touch with, those were some LONG, tortuous hours and days having to wait to know if everyone was okay.

Fast forward to March 11, 2011, and the magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake hit forty-three miles off the coast of Japan, followed by mega-tsunami waves and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. Over 15,000 people died, and hundreds of thousands of buildings collapsed or were unsafe to occupy. As a result, more than 400,000 people were displaced and evacuated.

Both cell phones and landlines were down. However, even with the main trans-Pacific cable severed, basic internet was restored in some areas. During this chaotic time, Facebook became one of the most critical ways friends and families checked on each other and communicated.

Facebook became an invaluable lifeline to those families utterly devastated by a whammy of three related mega catastrophes. The social network’s engineers noted this and were initially inspired to create a disaster-related discussion board.

This then burgeoned into Facebook’s Safety Check tool, which they announced in October of 2014. The goal of this tool was to make it easier and quicker to communicate whether or not you are safe during a disaster and to facilitate communication with your family and friends listed on Facebook.

How Does Facebook’s Safety Check-In Feature Work

When a mega-crisis occurs, Facebook activates the tool across the entire social network. The program then searches for everyone affected by looking at the city people have listed in their profile, the location of their last check-in, and the city from which people most recently accessed their account. Those affected receive a notification from Facebook asking if they are affected and safe. Once they respond to this inquiry, an update is automatically sent to all their friends and family on Facebook.

Where and When Has the Tool Been Used

The first time Facebook’s Safety Check-In Feature was officially used was on April 25, 2015, during the Nepal Earthquake. It was used again shortly afterward during one of the significant aftershocks of this terrible earthquake. It was used again in October 2015 when Hurricane Patricia hit the western side of Mexico. Another natural disaster during which Safety Check was activated was the South Indian floods in late 2015.

The first non-natural crisis during which Safety Check was activated was the terror attacks in November 2015 in Paris, France. In March 2016, Safety Check was activated for the Brussels airport and train station explosions.

The check-in feature was used eight times between October 2014 and November 2015. We know this because each of these activations was officially announced. However, since the tool was activated in the Boko Haram bombings in Nigeria, Mark Zuckerberg announced he would not be listing each activation since there are so many of these types of incidents in the world. Still, any time this tool is activated, it is usually reported at least in the regional news since it is so helpful in connecting friends and family.

Updates To Facebook’s Safety Check-In Feature

There are a few recent important updates to Facebook’s Safety Check-In Feature that will make it even better in the future. First, they have redesigned the activation procedure, so several more employees beyond the elite engineers can activate it. This was in response to the fact they missed activating Safety Check during a significant bombing incident in Beirut. Second, the development team has added eighty languages to the tool so it can be deployed in more areas worldwide, even reaching third-world countries and developing nations.

The company is beginning to test a new feature where anyone can launch Safety Check once a threshold is reached for people discussing a particular crisis and trusted third parties verify it. Once the bugs are worked out of the beta tests, the Safety Check tool will be used in many more crises and more localized crisis situations.

The feature was activated for the first time in the United States during the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, early Sunday morning on June 12, 2016.

If you have any questions about Facebook’s Safety Check-In Feature, please comment below. Also, learn about other Private Investigator Software Apps.

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