How Google and Facebook are finding victims of the Nepal earthquake

As the death toll from the April 25 7.8-magnitude Nepalese earthquake inches higher, help in finding and identifying missing persons has come from an unusual source: Silicon Valley tech giants. Both Google and Facebook deployed collaborative, cellphone-based tools to help track victims of the earthquake. In the midst of both company’s big push to bring Internet to the developing world, it’s an important illustration of exactly how powerful that connectivity could be. And yet, in a country like Nepal -- where there are only 77 cellphone subscriptions per 100 people versus 96 in the US and 125 in the UK -- it’s also a reminder of how very far that effort still has to go.

Facebook’s Safety Check essentially lets users do two things, depending on where they are. Users in an area impacted by a natural disaster can log onto the site and mark themselves as “safe.” Meanwhile, users around the world can log into the site and check if any of their friends are in the impacted area. Like Safety Check, Google Person Finder is intended to connect people in a disaster area with friends and family around the world. Google’s five-year-old project also operates on a larger scale, however: It basically provides a massive, open platform to collaboratively track missing persons’ reports. Previously, Google’s deployed the tool to help victims in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan and the Boston bombing. That raises an interesting question about the whole Silicon Valley-saves-the-world complex: How useful are these services, really, if most people can’t access them?