Facebook will soon provide three international aid organizations with aggregated real-time data about its users in the event of major disasters that the company hopes will help those groups better respond.
Facebook said Wednesday it will give the aid organizations maps that show, for example, how many people in a concentrated area have marked themselves as “safe” through Facebook’s “safety check” feature. If relatively few people in an area hit by a disaster report themselves as safe, that could be an indication that help is needed there.
Molly Jackman, public-policy research manager at Facebook, said that location maps will show “where there are more people than where we would expect them to be and where there are fewer people than where we expect them to be” compared with data collected before the disaster. And maps tracking the movement of people can give aid organizations a better understanding of evacuation routes and indicate where groups should direct resources, she said.
Facebook will provide information only in the aggregate, she said, withholding information that could identify individual people. Facebook said it will initially provide the maps to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Unicef, and the World Food Programme, with plans to include others in the future. It comes at no cost to the organizations.
Ms. Jackman said that she and her colleagues spend a lot of time talking to policy makers and humanitarian organizations about how the company can serve them better and described the mapping work as one major step in that direction. “We probably have one of the richest social-science data sets in world,” Ms. Jackman said.
Facebook has worked for years to map remote regions of the world that lack accurate population counts, mostly with an eye toward expanding internet connectivity, a key business objective for company co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. A recent project by the company’s Connectivity Lab used satellite imagery, artificial intelligence, and, when available, census data to create detailed population maps of 20 countries.
Dale Kunce, who leads projects related to American Red Cross’s use of technology and data during international disasters, said that his organization already uses Facebook’s mapping for work such as measles-vaccination efforts in Malawi.
While the new disaster-related mapping efforts draw on different data sources, Mr. Kunce noted that the number of professionals working on digital mapping is small and said that the partnership grew out of that existing work. He said working with Facebook and other consumer technology companies makes sense for aid groups because so many people already have those applications downloaded and operating on personal mobile devices.
“One of the things we’ve been getting smarter and smarter about as humanitarians is if you push out a specific app that says, ‘Hey, do this thing for me’ in a certain humanitarian context, your adoption rate is not going to be that high.”
Being able to use a popular consumer product “for an added value, a higher level of good, is really, really nice,” Mr. Kunce said.
The Red Cross, he said, began using satellite mapping to shape its emergency-response efforts in earnest in 2013 amid the Typhoon Haiyan disaster in the Philippines. Mapping houses in residential areas, for example, helped the group better organize the distribution of relief supplies to storm victims.
Huge swaths of the world remain unmapped, he said, and Facebook’s data could help create a fuller picture for aid workers in remote places.
“I’ll never say ‘no’ to data,” he said.
Facebook has already proven itself a powerful tool amid disasters in more ways than one. Its “safety check” feature allows people to indicate on their profiles that they were unharmed by a disaster. It was activated most recently after the terrorist attack on the London Bridge and nearby Borough Market.
It’s also a conduit for donations. For example, in May 2015, Facebook raised more than $15 million for the International Medical Corps for its response to the deadly earthquake in Nepal. The company donated $2 million more.
The company has been steadily building its charitable fundraising features. Starting in June 2016, Facebook added a feature to allow people on Facebook to start fundraising campaigns on the site for verified nonprofits. And earlier this year, the company also began allowing its users to raise donations for personal needs, including education expenses, medical procedures, and funeral costs.
