Facebook is working on user-activated Safety Checks

Facebook's Safety Check has proven an invaluable tool for people to contact their friends and families in the immediate aftermath of large scale disasters. At a public Q&A session in Luiss University in Rome on Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the crowd that his company is also working on a means of letting any user activate the emergency system on their own.

"If we're building a community product, this is one of the moments of truth for us," Zuckerberg explained. "When Safety Check got started a couple of years ago, it was only for natural disasters. Unfortunately since then we've had to expand it to terrorist attacks too, because that's just been too common over the last few years. The next thing we need to do is make it so that communities can trigger it themselves when there is some disaster."

There's no word yet as to when the feature will actually go live, nor did Zuckerberg expound on how users would be able to activate it or what events would qualify for a Safety Check.