Kae15

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**Google person finder**
..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... On March 11th, magnitude 9.8 Earthquake and Tsunami have attacked northern parts of Japan. Buildings have collapsed and many people were pinned under the buildings. Some people were floated away from the place they were live by the Tsunami. After the disaster, electricity has stopped and the Interned has downed in some areas of northern Japan. Therefore, most of victims have low opportunity of keeping contact with their family or friends. As the matter of fact, families or friends of victims who are living in the other side of Japan are only have limited information about the current situation in that area.

 Japanese government as well as international organizations are taking their best effort to search and rescue victims. Meanwhile, the one of the most well known website Google, has implemented a new online technology called Person Finder to help Japanese government and relatives of victims to find missing people.  Google's Person Finder is an online tool, which helps victims and family to locate one another. In order to find out the missing person, it requires people to enter the general information (such as name, age, location) about that person. And then it reports back someone who have been found in what time and place.

.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................  The main stakeholders involved in this concept are the victims of the disaster, people who have relatives or friends in the northern part of Japan and the website organizers. Organizers will have more visitors since from the website’s foundation. Victims and their family or friends will fell relief when they found person on the Google person finder and given the information that they are safe.  However, Google person finder is not only used for Japan’s tragedy. When it no longer to be used for finding missing people in Japan, it will be useful in the case of emergency, kidnap, disappearance, and so on. The stakeholders will be changed according to in what situation that the public uses the tool. Therefore, the public is also added as the stakeholder in this IT concept.

 Areas that Google person finder is impacting are the society and emergency. Google's people finder is not only used in disaster, but also in the other situation. For example, in the business, Google person finder helps businessperson to find a customer’s phone number and address. For the emergency, like people used in the disaster, they will be able to find out the missing person whether they are alive or not.

..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... From now, I’m going to talk about advantage and disadvantage on the main stakeholders. For the people in Japan, they are more likely to take positive side by using the Google person finder. First, by using this website, it is much easier for victims to find their lost family. Second, survived victim and family will easily to be locating one another. However, these two advantages are only applied to people who have connection to the Internet. Therefore this is more likely to be relevant on a victim’s family for friends who are living out of the stricken area. Third, rescue party may easily identify the one who is rescued. This also helps victims to give the information who do not have the Internet connection.

 The disadvantages are first; uploaded information may not be always accurate. Because there are low opportunities of the Internet connection, and there might be changes in the information. It is hard for victims as well as rescue team to keep the information up to date in the minute. Second, there are possibilities of fraud. Take the death of the famous singer, Michael Jackson as example. When Michael Jackson had passed away, there are many new websites came up in the Internet browser. The website call itself as memento of Michael Jackson’s works and allow people to download his music. However, the halves of websites were just frauds. When people get to open the website or download a file on the site, it actually sends spam or let people to download the viruses. And same things are also happening in Japan. When people look at similar websites to Google person finder in order to get safety of victims in the northern part of Japan, some of websites send spam or hack the computer through the Internet connection.

.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................  There are three different social and ethical issues involved in this IT concepts. First, is security, which I have mentioned in the previous paragraph, that information may be used for crimes for example to steal banking information. Second is reliability, which I also mentioned in the other paragraph that uploaded information is not always accurate. Third is the equality of access to the Internet. There are many victims who do not have access to the Internet due to power failure and non-working Internet. The Google person finder brought out lots of advantages for people in Japan. However, it is concelebrating that how people are going to use them effectively when it is no longer used for the catastrophes. (828 words)