Economy
Facebook Is Using Your Profile to Track Global Urban Migration Trends
Which cities attract the most people, and what kinds of communities are losing them.
Facebook possesses a startlingly massive trove of data on global migration patterns. It's hidden, innocuously enough, amid two simple biographical details that many people post on their profile pages: Where you live, and where you're from.
Between those two data points – spread across the millions of its 1 billion users who volunteer this information – Facebook can paint a picture of where large population shifts take place, which cities seem to attract the most people, and what kinds of communities are losing them.