Facebook. For some time, the American company has started a secret project that targets the entire humanity, the Americans masking everything with an apparently noble intention, but the reality is completely different. More precisely, in 2016 Facebook announced a project to create population density maps for several countries in Africa, all with the idea of seeing where the majority of people in African countries live, which at the time seemed like a good idea.
Facebook. What the Americans didn't say then is that this project actually targets the entire planet, not just Africa, and only testing is done there before it is applied globally by the company. In Africa, Facebook has created maps with the population density of 22 countries, but at the global level it has many more problems in being able to create maps of this kind, and this is because of the way in which modern cities around the world have been created .
Facebook. The SECRET Project Targeting ALL of Humanity
Facebook. Artificial intelligence is used by the American company to create these population density maps, and this is because using people to complete the project is far too expensive and takes far too long. Facebook used the maps from Open Street Map to create these population density maps, and this is because in Africa there is no better provider for this kind of information, but in other areas of the globe there are other alternatives.
Using a mixture of machine learning techniques, high-resolution satellite imagery, and population data, we mapped hundreds of millions of structures distributed across vast areas and then used that to extrapolate the local population density. The satellite maps used in this project were generated using commercially available satellite images from DigitalGlobe — the same type of imagery made available via publicly accessible mapping services. The other major data source for the maps is national census data for each country that was shared with Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), which collaborated with Facebook researchers on this project.
Facebook. The company hides everything behind an apparently good idea of presenting more clearly the population density of the entire globe, but in reality it wants to benefit from this process. How Facebook will manage to make money from maps of this kind is difficult to imagine at the moment, but it is very possible that Mark Zuckerberg will use the information to increase the number of users of the social network.