Written by Alasdair Pall and Jill Gralow
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Social media companies' refusal to give emergency services free access to their data is hampering response teams globally, the Australian head of the world's largest volunteer firefighting force said on Tuesday, as bushfires continue to rage in Los Angeles.
New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS) Commissioner Rob Rogers (NYSE:) said companies including Elon Musk's X and Meta, which owns Facebook (NASDAQ:) and Instagram, could save lives by giving first responders access Back. To the data.
The RFS runs a network of around 74,000 volunteer firefighters and full-time staff to protect one of the world's most fire-prone regions.
Australia suffered a catastrophic series of bushfires in 2019-2020 known as the “Black Summer,” which destroyed an area the size of Turkey and killed 33 people, most of them in New South Wales.
In response, the RFS commissioned Athena, a computer program named after the Greek goddess of wisdom and protector of cities, that uses artificial intelligence to predict where fires might spread.
Rogers said the program could be made more robust by better integrating it with social media users' posts about wildfires as they start and spread.
He said that X and Meta did not want to provide the backend data to emergency services at no cost.
“We have much better tools than we had even in 2019 (and) 2020… but social media integration certainly remains a challenge for us,” he told Reuters in an interview.
“They are unwilling to provide us with data.
Meta and X did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Social media platforms provide businesses and organizations with access to application programming interfaces (APIs), a system that allows different software applications to seamlessly exchange data, but the fees involved were “beyond our ability to do so,” Rogers said.
“This is something that is probably bigger than just us. I think this is a worldwide emergency service problem,” he said, without providing details about the cost of access to the API.
Extremely dry conditions and winds approaching 100 mph (160 kph) made it nearly impossible to contain the fires in Los Angeles, Rogers said.
He added: “It is very similar to what happened in 2019 and 2020 on very bad days. Fire will do what fire will do.”
“All you can do is try to protect things before that fire, but it will burn where it burns, and for us to think we have the power to stop it, we are only fooling ourselves.”
