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April 16, 2013

Google Person Finder Service Widely Used After Boston Bombing

By Ed Silverstein, TMCnet Contributor

Monday’s bombing during the Boston Marathon has led to Google (News - Alert) once again offering its services through the Person Finder service.



Person Finder helps people locate and find out about friends, relatives, employees and neighbors. As of mid-morning Tuesday (ET) the site was tracking about 5,200 records. It is part of Google Crisis Response.

Not only does it let concerned individuals find out about loved ones, it gets activated quickly and becomes an option to phone lines – which often get clogged in such emergencies.

The site was activated Monday shortly after two bombs exploded. As of latest reports, three people were killed and more than 170 suffered injuries, some of which were very serious. No arrests were made as of Tuesday morning, but the inquiry into the attack was called a “potential terrorism investigation,’’ news reports said citing a top, unnamed government official.

Meanwhile, Google cautions all of the data entered in the finder service can be viewed by the general public and anyone can use it. In addition, Google does not independently review or verify the accuracy of the information on the site. There are deadlines, after which information on a person carried on the site will be deleted.

The Person Finder service was built after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Mashable reported. It has been used in several crises since then. These include: the 2010 Chile earthquake, the 2010 Pakistan floods, the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the 2011 Van earthquake, according to a forum posted on Reddit.

“This was a great addition to the technical landscape following the 2010 Haiti earthquake,” a blogger named “kilsythe” commented on the forum. “Before the telecommunications infrastructures came back online (around 48-72 hours later) there was very little means to get information out of the country. Largely unable to communicate with people in-country, the volunteer technical communities started building people finders and before we knew it there were about a dozen people finders with various accounts and updates. Google built theirs just about overnight and we were able to consolidate most of the data on their platform. As the other comments confirm, it's been used all over the world in post-disaster situations to reconnect people. Really great project.”

People Finder uses free and open source software. It uses PFIF and provides PFIF import and export, and PFIF Atom feeds, Google said.

Another service is provided by the American Red Cross, known as Safe and Well.

In the case of the Boston bombings, key numbers are: the city of Boston mayor's hotline for families of victims: 617-635-4500 and a tip line for witnesses who may have information for the city’s police department: 800-494-8477.


Edited by Rory J. Thompson
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