Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Has Mapped the Entire Human Population of Earth (cnbc.com)
Facebook doesn't only know what its 2 billion users "Like." It now knows where 7.5 billion humans live, everywhere on earth, to within 15 feet. From a report: The company has created a data map of the planet's entire human population by combining government census numbers with information it's obtained from space satellites, according to Janna Lewis, Facebook's head of strategic innovation partnerships and sourcing. The mapping technology, which Facebook says it developed itself, can pinpoint any man-made structures in any country on earth to a resolution of five meters. Facebook is using the data to understand the precise distribution of humans around the planet.
Now now, let's not all panic. Perhaps Facebook intends to do only good things with all this information!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Few years ago they did a similar thing as an academic super computing exercise. They could map an area of a size of California in minutes, if I recall correctly. Take a pair of oil tankers and a satellite, put a super computer in one of them and an automatic cruise missile launcher in the other. Destroy all humans from any California sized part of the world. "Profit".