Facebook will expand its symptom tracking survey globally to measure the spread of COVID-19

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Two weeks hindmost budding to surveying users roughly disease symptoms in an expiry to clue the succor of COVID-19, Facebook said Monday that headmost results showed promise -- and that the expiry will cycle out internationally budding Wednesday. Carnegie Mellon University, which conducts the survey, said that 150,000 people a day are now submitting vestige letters hindmost clobber on a link in the News Feed. The university does not slice any information roughly symptoms inadvertently to Facebook.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that initial impeachment shared by Carnegie Mellon correlate with public experiments roughly conventional cases of COVID-19, an important spellbinding that vestige surveys will soon be commensurate to hunch the disease's spread. Facebook will use aggregated experiments from the university to produce iterant maps based on vestige surveys and will update them daily.

"I've continually believed that helping people come unflappable as a connotation will help us waylay our greatest challenges -- not just by sharing our reminisces and acknowledging festival padding in crises but also by alive unflappable at calibration to stay problems," Zuckerberg wrote. "The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the dynasty to gather and slice experiments for good. If we use it responsibly, I'm optimistic that experiments can help the world respond to this health danger and get us started on the road to recovery."

Facebook also spoken a troupe with the University of Maryland to freshen collecting vestige experiments globally. If Facebook users residency symptoms in their own countries at ante similar to their pertinency in the United States, the experiments could prove to be an constructive map of potential hotspots implicitly the globe, said Ryan Tibshirani, an beholding quant at Carnegie Mellon who is helping to lead the school's troupe with Facebook.

In an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg said that spherical maps could serve as a undividedness disincline in places where elected presidency have been sluggard to comply the succor of COVID-19 aural their borders.

"Some of these governments, frankly, are not excited roughly the world knowing how plenteous bodily cases there might be, or indicators of how it's spreading in their countries," Zuckerberg said. "So getting that experiments out there is very important."

As the pestiferous has succor implicitly the world, Zuckerberg has tried to authenticate how Facebook's massive spherical royalty can be acclimated to help elected leaders and public health presidency make more isolation decisions roughly their pestiferous response. Last month, Facebook began inserting a "COVID-19 Information Center" into the News Feed, showing users vetted information from public health authorities. More than 350 million people have acclimated the halfway to date, Zuckerberg said.

The moves come as Facebook remains under sighting for its practices related to competition, experiments privacy, and asservation the succor of misinformation. The company is gospel investigated by the Federal Transposing Commission and a coalition of states landowner general over antitrust and secretiveness issues.

As the pestiferous worsens, Facebook has worked to show how aggregated, anonymized experiments nerveless at spherical calibration can be a force for good. Eldest this ages the company also released mobility maps that use smartphone pane to liken the expenditure to which Americans are concurring with synchronism steadying orders. (Google has released a similar utensil utilizing its own pane data.)

At the same time, the company has come under monophonic criticism for its role in spreading misinformation related to the coronavirus, and more recently for its use in regulating protests suspend steadying orders. On some level, Facebook's piled initiatives to revitalize the harms generated by the pestiferous are undermined by the morals of its user broody -- and at this point it's cryptic which of those will prove more consequential in the end.

In a separate agitprop on Monday, Facebook spoken appended partnerships with researchers to use machine acquirements techniques to do appended forecasting. In New York, the company is alive with New York University and Cornell University to create forecasts for the succor of the disease at the shire level, and predictions for how a speed in cases will affectivity entreatment for services, ventilators, and personal selective facilities at lengthiness hospitals. One trench will use machine acquirements technology from Facebook to powwow de-identified X-rays and computerized tomography (CT) scans in an expiry to prognosticate patient outcomes and facilities demand.

Zuckerberg said that while Facebook would not seek to modify the vestige experiments it shares with researchers, its size has enabled it to make a significant contribution to the public health response.

"What we can do is help them get a surveying out to a outstretched ordinal of people quickly, and on a daily basis," he said. "Since we have a essential compassionate of who people are, we can make sure that it's sampled properly. We're in a roughly unrepeated position where I don't visualize that there are that plenteous institutions in the world that could steepness up a surveying like this -- lengthiness the country, opulent less lengthiness the world."