Didi Chuxing riders to join hunt for China’s missing children
New alert based on US missing children broadcast
China’s largest ride-sharing company, Didi Chuxing, announced on Wednesday that its app will double up as a broadcasting platform to notify riders to look out for missing children.
Didi Chuxing said that when law enforcement agencies uploaded information about a missing child onto the official “Tuan Yuan” platform, which translates as “reunion” in English, the Didi app would flash an alert with key information on the case to its users, including the child’s name, gender, age, last seen location and the contact for the local police.
Tuan Yuan was modeled on the America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response (AMBER), which started in the US in 1996 in response to the abduction and murder that year in Texas of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman.
The aim of these so-called “AMBER alerts” is to make the public aware as quickly as possible of an abduction so they can report any sightings or other information to authorities.
Didi’s nearly-400 million users in more than 400 Chinese cities will be part of a virtual volunteer network to help missing children reunite with their families. By tracking a Didi rider’s GPS location, those within a 100 kilometre (62 miles) radius of a child’s last known location will receive the alert first, and the radius would expand subsequently.
China’s Ministry of Public Security and technology giant Alibaba launched the Tuan Yuan platform in May.