OK, OK, it doesn’t actually want your organs. Well, yet. We’re sure that when the Zuckerbeast needs a liver, Facebook will suddenly have an interesting change in its terms of service.
But, for now, they’ve actually done something positive: edited the Timeline feature so that you can specify that you’re an organ donor. The idea is that you tag “organ donor” onto your profile, which will in theory make finding said donors a lot easier to do. This isn’t a minor problem, either:
More than 114,000 U.S. residents are waiting for organ donations, according to the U.S. Department of Health. “Many of those people — an average of 18 people per day — will die waiting, because there simply aren’t enough organ donors to meet the need,” Zuckerberg and Sandberg said.
Using the power of Facebook, they want those figures to fall.
It’s a good idea, and a noble goal, but we do foresee a few problems with it. For one thing, not even the Privacy Invaders who run FB were willing to ask people to publicly post their blood type, which is pretty crucial information and makes finding an organ that much harder. They might be able to get the word out, which is good, but a searchable database would make more sense.
On the other hand, we dread what would happen if Facebook got its hands on our medical records, so maybe stopping here was a good idea.
(Image via Facebook)