Facebook partners with US police to issue missing children alerts
Facebook is to partner with US law enforcement officials to issue missing children alerts to members news feeds if their location happens to correspond with an area of interest designated by the police.
So called amber alerts will notifying them of the missing child’s image alongside other relevant information in a joint initiative coordinated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children but Facebook insists there will be no direct notification sent to mobile phones.
Facebook's trust and safety manager Emily Vacher, herself a former FBI agent, commented: “When people see this on Facebook we want them to know that this is a very rare occurrence.”
The tie-up follows growing acknowledgment of the power of social media in being able to locate missing individuals, most recently demonstrated by the case of a missing 11 year-old who was tracked to a motel room in South Carolina after a clerk phoned police.
Some 700 children have been located as a direct result of police alerts since the system was first introduced in 1996.