Google has been in Japan for a decade now, but the company has perhaps made its most significant inroads in the towns and cities devastated by March’s tsunami. The company has begun using its Street View ^[1] technology in the disaster zone to document damage.

Soon after disaster struck in March, the company quickly built a Person Finder ^[2] site that Google employees and anonymous volunteers used to post names of survivors and missing persons. The site compiled lists of persons from the handwritten wanted posters that anxious friends and family members posted on the walls of evacuation shelters. Person Finder has become the largest database of missing people from the disaster with 616,300 records.

Back in the States, Google’s Street View has been running into some legal entanglements ^[3], specifically involving allegations that the technology violates wiretapping laws.

Read more at The New York Times ^[4].