Facebook's COVID-19 survey to be available to users worldwide

Technical: Facebook on Monday said it will start rolling out symptoms tracking survey globally later this week. The social networking company had tied up with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Delphi Research Centre to conduct the initial phase of survey which has been running for almost two weeks.

Facebook said that about 1 million responses a week have been registered in the survey (US). Users participate in the survey by clicking on a link of News Feed of users.

Mark Zuckerberg in an Op-Ed in Washington Post stressed the need for data analytics to help map the spread of Covid-19 around the world. He said that the tool can soon help predict the spread of diseases in different parts of the world.

“I’ve always believed that helping people come together as a community will help us address our greatest challenges — not just by sharing our experiences and supporting each other in crises but also by working together at scale to solve problems. The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good. If we use it responsibly, I’m optimistic that data can help the world respond to this health crisis and get us started on the road to recovery,” he wrote in the post.

Zuckerberg revealed Facebook has also teamed up with researchers at New York University and the Mila research institute in Montreal to use cutting edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and help medical institutes better forecast the need for resources such as PPE and ventilators.

He also stressed that the data can be used to unlock “a lot of good” but also highlighted the need for privacy.

“It’s important that organizations involved in this work commit to doing it in a way that protects people’s information and that any data collected is used solely for responding to public health emergencies and for other crisis response efforts. Fighting the pandemic has required taking unprecedented measures across society, but it shouldn’t mean sacrificing our privacy,” he wrote.