Helping people instead of business: Google’s actions after the earthquake in Japan

Google Street View cars drive through the streets of European and American cities, but have not enjoyed a good reputation for a long time. Another memorable story is the theft of private data from open WiFi hotspots , and indeed few people will like such a high-tech spy, slowly wandering around the house.

Particularly big problems were in Japan, because the Japanese especially value privacy. The authorities of almost a dozen Japanese cities demanded to remove the photos or to study the legality of such photography.

But after the earthquake in Japan, panoramic shots of Google Street View came in handy. Now a project is being developed in which Street View cars will periodically patrol the streets of cities for constant monitoring of how the reconstruction process is going. Surprisingly, many municipalities agreed to participate in this project, even those that previously demanded to remove Google cars from the city. Google Street View is not the only way Google has applied its technology to help victims in Japan, NY Times writes .

In the first hours after the tragedy, Google launched the Person Finder website.for Japan - this service helps people learn about the condition of their friends and relatives affected by the disaster. They say that it was very actively used by the Japanese in the early days and was almost the only place on the Internet where people could get relevant information.

Analysts say it’s too early to talk about increasing advertising revenue and Google’s search share in Japan, but remember that this country is the second largest online advertising market in the world after the United States. And this is one of the few countries in the world where Google is not a leader in search (with a rate of 39.6%, it is second after Yahoo Japan, although Yahoo Japan recently switched to search from Google, but can change its mind at any time). In addition, Google in Japan had some problems with the public image, so increasing brand awareness can greatly improve the company's market position.

It would be cynical to believe that Google’s humanitarian efforts are motivated by a desire to improve its public image. Moreover, this is an absolute lie. Firstly, the same Person Finder was launched back in 2010 after the earthquake in Haiti (Google was unlikely to think about improving the image in Haiti), and its Japanese version was opened less than two hours after the earthquake . This was done by developers from the Tokyo office of Google, who themselves were not far from the epicenter. Immediately after that, they abandoned their usual projects and together they began to make a new site.

Everyone shared ideas: one made support for local phones, the other implemented a layer for Google Maps. When the evacuation centers started publishing lists with surnames, they asked people to take photos using their mobile phones - and upload them to Picasa. Approximately one hundred sales managers in the Tokyo office were engaged in processing photographs so that current lists quickly appeared on the site. However, very quickly people sent almost a thousand pictures and Google employees could not cope. Then anonymous users joined Google’s business unexpectedly: over the course of several weeks, about 5,000 people helped transcribe more than 10,000 photos, and the Person Finder database has expanded to more than 140,000 names.

Soon, Tokyo office employees began phoning state organizations and regional authorities in order to replenish their base. For many Japanese officials and politicians, this was the first experience with Google - many were surprised to hear this name. But the answer was always the same: everyone instantly agreed to help and shared the available lists. One by one, all Japanese agencies, major newspapers, and even the usually closed main police headquarters - they all provided lists for Person Finder, a total of 616,300 entries were collected in the database and it became Japan's largest resource for missing people.