Associated Press
Facebook released a tool in 2019 designed to track people's movements and demographics during a disease outbreak.
- Facebook has built a tool meant to help track the movements and demographics of people affected by a disease outbreak.
- The tool, called Disease Prevention Maps, was first released in 2019. Now, it's already being used by universities and health nonprofits for COVID-19 prevention.
- The US government is reportedly considering asking Facebook to develop a similar tool for tracking the spread of the virus in the US.
- Here's a breakdown of how it works.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Facebook's 2.5 billion active users give the tech company a wealth of information about where its users live, how they're moving, and their access to internet and cell service.
Transform talent with learning that worksCapability development is critical for businesses who want to push the envelope of innovation.Discover how business leaders are strategizing around building talent capabilities and empowering employee transformation.Know More Now, a Facebook tool that aggregates that data could help authorities understand and fight the spread of COVID-19.
Facebook's Disease Prevention Maps tool was first released in 2019, months before COVID-19 had been identified. In the past year, it's been used to track the spread of cholera in Mozambique and to help improve vaccination rates in Malawi.
This week, as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases surged past 200,000 worldwide, the US government has reportedly turned to Facebook to aggregate similar data to track the spread of the virus. The notion has rankled privacy advocates, but Facebook insists that the data is anonymized and presented in general trends, not used to track individuals.
Laura McGorman, policy lead for Facebook's Data for Good team, said in a statement to Business Insider that researchers and nonprofits are already able to use Disease Prevention Maps for COVID-19 prevention efforts. Facebook has not made real-time maps available to the general public.
"Disease Prevention Maps have helped organizations respond to health emergencies for over a year and we've heard from a number of governments that they're supportive of this work," McGorman said. "[The maps] are built with aggregated and anonymized data that people opt in to share, to understand and help combat the spread of the virus."
Here's a breakdown of what Facebook's Disease Prevention Maps look like and how they work.