Instagram Amber Alerts to find Missing Children

June 4, 2022

Recently, Meta announced to roll out ‘AMBER alerts’ to Instagram across 25 countries.

Key Facts

AMBER alerts will help users to get notifications of missing children in the area.
This feature was already present on Meta’s Facebook app since 2015, that has helped in finding hundreds of children.
If law enforcement activate AMBER Alert and people are in the designated search area, alert will now appear in the Instagram feed.

Who developed the AMBER Alerts for Instagram?

‘AMBER alerts’ for Instagram was developed in association with various organisations such as, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in United States and International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children.

Working Mechanism

AMBER alerts will be specific to the search area. Thus, if any user receives one, it will imply that, search for a missing child is in progress across their vicinity. This mechanism will use following information to decide if the alert should be sent or not:

City listed on user’s Instagram profile
User’s IP address and location services (if turned on).

The AMBER alert will include important details about child like photo, location of the abduction, description, and other available information. People would also be able to share the alert with friends to further spread the word.

Countries that will get AMBER alerts

Support for AMBER alerts will be available with 25 countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, Canada, Greece, Belgium, Bulgaria, Ecuador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Ireland, Korea, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Malta, Mexico, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Romania, Ukraine, South Africa, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates. Instagram is also working to bring this feature to more regions in near future.

About Instagram

Instagram was founded in 2010 as a photo and video sharing social networking service. It was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. But later, it was acquired by Facebook Inc (Now called Meta).

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