Selfie Deaths
Divides 30 to 45 deaths a year by the entire phone-owning planet. Almost every death happened at a cliff edge, a waterfall, a rooftop or a railway line. Selfies in the kitchen do not count.
Calculate Your Risk
The misleading stat
More selfie deaths than shark attack deaths
(global average, including people never exposed)
vs
Your actual annual risk
1 in 14,286
(0.0070% chance per year)
For comparison
- Car crash (US annual): 1 in 8,000
- Lightning strike (US annual): 1 in 16,000,000
- Shark attack (global annual): 1 in 800,000,000
Methodology & sources
This calculator multiplies chained probabilities:
- Selfies at the edge
- Trips per year
- Something goes wrong: 0.000014 — Site estimate, back-calculated: ~50 deaths/year (round upper figure for 30-45 media-reported deaths, Bansal et al. 2018; Linares et al. 2022) ÷ ~35 million hazardous-location selfies/year ÷ 0.1 fatality share = 1.4e-5. Roughly 1 mishap per 70,000 edge selfies
- Fatal outcome: 0.1 — Falls from height and drowning dominate reported selfie deaths (Bansal et al., 2018; Linares et al., 2022). ~1 in 10 serious falls/immersions at these sites is fatal