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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Respectfully, that doesn't answer the question. What is the current policy for determining use?
The real reason, which they probably can't say, is how much media attention it gets in the USA.
> If you are in an area impacted by a disaster Facebook will send you a push notification asking if you are OK. I guess that's great during an earthquake but can be terrible when you're hiding during a terrorist act.
If it's any comfort, most people have push notifications turned off for the main Facebook app (understandably since we send quite a few of notifications). However anecdotally some of the survivors of the attacks mentioned that they got phone calls from concerned friends / families while hiding in the Bataclan, which was understandably stressful.
On the other side, the push notification can alert people yet unaware of the situation, and save their life.
I guess we will have to wait until Facebook brilliant AI team can automagically figure when it's pertinent to push that crucial notification!
What kind of context hints could be used? heartbeat rate? analyzing ambient sounds like screams, detonations, explosions, or silence? analyzing surrounding voices to detect emotions like anger, distress, pain or fear in smartphone owner voice or other people? extracting dangerous location from media streams, and correlate with geolocalized users' positions? using other geolocalized users' answers (safe/not safe)?
I'm aware some proposition are not really realistic (yet) or somehow really creepy.
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Also, back to earthquakes, using context hints of lot of smartphones going from 'still' state to 'tilting' state, in a relatively localized region, could you detect earthquakes occurring quasi real-time? and push a warning notifications to your friends faster than the quake waves? « possible incoming quake in 5 seconds, brace yourself » ( à la https://xkcd.com/723/ )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real reason, which they probably can't say, is how much media attention it gets in the USA.
I'm entertaining the notion that this is a way to justify some new privacy-invading feature. I'd love to be wrong, and I'm open to a statement from a FB employee, if such a thing were possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As described in a post by Zuckerberg, before the Paris attack it was only activated for natural disasters. Paris was the first time it was activated for human disasters and they will be doing it more in the future.
Respectfully, that doesn't answer the question. What is the current policy for determining use?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Respectfully, that doesn't answer the question. What is the current policy for determining use?
The real reason, which they probably can't say, is how much media attention it gets in the USA.
>The average distance between any two of Facebook’s 1.5 billion users is 4.74 edges. Sorry Kevin. With 1.5 billion users the whole graph can be explored within 5 hops. Nitpicking here, but that does not follow. Starting from a random user and hopping 5 times in all directions you'd expect to explore about half of the graph.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They probably are very generous - I'd imagine the entire country was defined as the "area". The system doesn't work very well if there's false negatives and people don't see it, and if someone sees it but shouldn't all they have to do is hit that they're OK.
France is a pretty big country. If you are in Nice, you are a nine hour drive from Paris. It would seem a bit silly to ask if you were okay, and not someone in Belgium who is much, much closer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are not OK with the NSA doing this and (theoretically) not viewing the data. We are OK with Facebook doing this and exploiting the data for monetary and market advantages.
Generally people are ok with Facebook doing it because they can opt out. If you notice, the times people really get upset about companies tracking their personal information is if it's either not disclosed or it's done in a shady manner. Also, capitalist societies tend to treat state actors differently than private corporations. It's much easier to choose a new corporation to interact with and the state tends to have…
On the same vein as accepting every terms and conditions that comes your way, I think most people are severely uninformed about this. It's like how many people believe software engineering is "magic", they believe Facebook or the government will protect them with "magic". Hint: there is no magic.
> If you are in an area impacted by a disaster Facebook will send you a push notification asking if you are OK. I guess that's great during an earthquake but can be terrible when you're hiding during a terrorist act.
Most of the trainings that I've gotten for active shooter-type events (gov't employee; they're frequent these days) advises you to silence your phone since the first thing that's gonna happen when the news shows up is everyone is gonna call you anyways.