Warning: Do Not Trust Death Reports on Google Person Finder

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If you are using Google’s Person Finder App to search for information about people who were in Japan during the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, please be warned: the site has fallen victim to dozens of trolls. Legitimate inquiries by family members are being met with untruthful death notice responses from mean-spirited jerks.

Here are a few examples of comments reporting the deaths of several people:

Many of the death reports have been flagged as spam, but even when that happens, the app still shows a “someone has reported that this person is dead” notice on the search result screen. In several cases, the surviving person has already left a reply saying that they are indeed okay, but the app still reports them as dead.

A great tool that could help people has been trashed. Until methods are taken to crack down on trolling, it would not be a good idea to trust anything one reads on that site.

Update: I have been informed by a reliable source that Google is now aware of the problem and is cleaning things up. It looks like almost all of the death notices from the above screen capture are now gone and the victims are no longer “dead” in the system.

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