Google Person Finder and Facebook Safety Check Activated in Earthquake Affected Pakistan & Afghanistan Areas

An earthquake measuring to a magnitude of 7.5 Richter scale according to USGC, as cited by Reuters press. The epicentre of the earthquake was in northern Afghanistan, just touching the border of Pakistan. Around 2:39 pm PST, massive jolts were felt not only in Afghanistan, but also rocked Hunza, Chitral, Dir, Peshawar, Islamabad and Lahore. Whereas the shocks were also reported as far as Delhi, India.

Complete damage is still under a shadow, and the details are coming in. Tech giants like Google and Facebook have rushed to provide their own set of tools to help those in need.

Google Person Finder

To help the locate people, Google has introduced the “Person Finder” application using Google Maps for Pakistan and Afghanistan. This tool allows people to search for loved ones by their name, and can also be used to build a database for all the people in the earthquake-affected areas.

You can either look for someone whose information has been fed into the Google database or provide the information for someone(including yourself), so others can search for you over their. It’s relatively simple and we recommend anyone living in the earthquake-affected area to use this tool.

Facebook Safety Check

Facebook’s “Safety Check” feature has also been activated and hundreds of people have started to mark them ‘safe’ to let their loved ones know.

If you or your friends live in the area near the earthquake, you should be seeing notifications about your friends checking in to let others know about their safety and getting an option to mark yourself safe. If you are not seeing this yet, simply head over to Facebook Afghanistan Earthquake site.

Google and Facebook have previously activated these features to help people locate people stranded after the Nepal Earthquake.