Yes, Facebook, I am safe – no thanks for asking | Tim Burrows

Facebook turned on Safety Check during the Westminster attack. In telling friends you are 'not marked as safe', is it providing another avenue for fear?

This morning, after reading the latest news updates about the terror attack on Westminster, I fired up Facebook. There I was met with an atypical request: a friend who lives an eight-hour flight away in Canada had asked me to mark myself "safe".

Clicking on the notification took me to Facebook's Safety Check page, which revealed that 31 of my friends were marked as safe, and 249 of my friends were "not marked as safe". The notion that these London-based friends were somehow in peril from an attack that was neutralised many hours ago seemed absurd to me in London. But it probably doesn't seem quite so silly to people's friends in New Zealand or Nigeria, who might not be so up to speed.

Safety Check works in a fairly simple way: "If you're in the affected area, you can tell your friends you're safe and check to see if they're safe, too," the company says. But the inevitable dichotomy this process creates - if you are in London during such a catastrophe, you are presumed unsafe until you have checked in as safe - is hopelessly inadequate in a city where 8.7 million people live.