Facebook releases 'Safety Check' | Hacker News Reader

Facebook releases 'Safety Check'

newsroom.fb.com

19 pointsshoshin237 comments

Seems nice , but would be interesting to read more articles on :

>>When the tool is activated after a natural disaster

1)What all disasters count as natural disaster ?

>>and if you’re in the affected area,

2)how does FB get data on radius of affected regions all over the world?Or how is affected region measured for each type of disaster

>> you’ll receive a Facebook notification asking if you’re safe.

3)Priorities in times of disaster and connectivity questions .Lets say connectivity is disrupted and even if the person is safe ,b/c he/she did not respond to notification would it mark that person as unsafe or unknown ?

So what if you aren't safe? There doesn't seem to be an option for "nope I'm in serious trouble here. Help me out."

A person's response to an emergency situation isn't symmetric in the case of safe/unsafe. If you aren't safe, you should either be on the phone with emergency services (911 here in the states), or someone who can help you directly. Facebook isn't the appropriate conduit through which you should communicate. That's why you don't see a "I'm in trouble" option. Facebook doesn't want to present themselves as a means to send distress messages.

Bradley hit the nail on the head -- we display a localized emergency services number in the Safety Check UI in case anyone needs to contact the actual authorities. We're not a conduit for life-or-death information like that (which is better handled by the government).

Source: engineer on the project

I think this is actually a rather good feature, although it does mean that there is more of a need to check facebook when a disaster is occurring... ad infinitum

It's a win-win situation.

- Users know that their families are safe.

- Facebook gets more user time.

Everyone wins.

This is a pretty great idea. I have a lot of friends in Japan and it could be pretty handy in case of a tsunami or taifun.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com