Then how does this sentence make sense?
> Google said on Tuesday that it would comply with the South Korean government's demand to blur sensitive satellite images on its mapping services, paving the way for the US tech giant to compete better with local navigation platforms.
Anyone in South Korea will continue to use Naver Maps or Kakao Maps.
> "...oogle would "invest a lot of time and resources" to remove the coordinates of security facilities from its maps."
Regardless of what's included in the above, I took the quoted sentence as meaning something like "because Google will blur the sensitive locations, Maps will now be able to provide directions between two points in South Korea instead of reporting 'Sorry, your search appears to be outside our current coverage area for driving'. This will enable it to be competitive with local navigation platforms". How many people will continue to use the existing services or switch over to Maps is not guaranteed, but I'm willing to bet the net effect is not 0.
Apple finally got the green light to enable Find My in South Korea back in April. Before that, you disappeared off the map when in South Korea, at least as far as Find My is concerned.
It's called the China GPS Shift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
When you consider SK's neighbors, and their neighbors' ambitions, it really isn't at all.
Compliance is fun.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503354 ("French homeland intelligence threatens a sysop into deleting a Wikipedia Article (wikimedia.fr)", 191 comments)
The military site in that dispute was
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pierre-sur-Haute_... ("Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station")
> "As a result of the controversy, the article temporarily became the most read page on the French Wikipedia, which was noted as an example of the Streisand effect.")
https://www.google.com/maps/place/46%C2%B046'51.6%22N+56%C2%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Pierre_and_Miquelon ("overseas collectivity of France in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean, located near the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador")
https://www.google.com/maps/@46.7812199,-56.1705941,3a,46.7y...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gravelines+Nuclear+Power+S...
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/google-to-obey-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w...
It's not anymore, though the maps are lower quality over DC now and the USG can just compel Google to edit the tiles to obscure details of sensitive sites.
Here's the deal:
Google Maps currently doesn't work well in South Korea. That's because the SK government has refused to give Google access to their official map data, because of "security concerns". They apparently had no problem giving map data to local SK companies, however, so essentially those companies had an unfair advantage.
While negotiating tariffs, it seems like Google was able to slip into the talks and cut a deal with the SK government to get the data. I guess a minor detail of the deal is that certain things will be blurred? I assume military bases?
And its not a "security issue". Only way that would be true is if they have a countrywide tarp across the country. /sarcasm
That can't be the case — blurry billboards saying essentially, "Nothing to see here!"
> That is because South Korean laws require that companies store core geospatial data locally, something Google has long refused to do.
Quote 2:
> That's because the SK government has refused to give Google access to their official map data, because of "security concerns".
Quote 3:
> Google said Tuesday it will accept the South Korean government's security requirements to remove coordinates for the Korean region from its map in order to secure approval to export high-precision map data overseas.
(via https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/business/tech-science/20250909/...)
(Quote 1) from the article is my prior understanding of the situation. Your claim (Quote 2) doesn't match my prior understanding either. I did some googling, and found additional reporting (Quote 3), which seems to be more precise and accurately contextualized than (Quote 1).
I am personally quite sympathetic to the posture of KR's government, regarding data sovereignty of high-precision map data. I understand that Google and other tech companies were always legally able to serve maps of SK of comparable quality from a datacenter in SK.
I don't suppose having GMaps installed by default on Android and having the backing of nation government that can bend entire countries to its whims are considered unfair advantages for Google ?
But a trade agreement doesn't mean that Google will get to disregard South Korean national security rules, so, blurring.
This isn't about nimble startups being protected against Google and Apple. It's Naver, Samsung and Kakao Corporations. They sometimes exercise vast power over government and so such decisions are less democratic than oligarchic.
Let's remember that all this protectionism ends up costing consumers. UX design in Korean apps alone sucks so hard, and there's monopolistic pricing for lots of services. Consumers could benefit from alternatives.
If your next-door neighbor had 50 nuclear weapons, and threatened to use them on you almost daily, you probably wouldn't use the dismissive scare quotes.
(I kid, I kid. I am sure they have access to Chinese spy satellite data)
Nearby where I live, there is an oil pipeline pump/monitor station. Shows up on Google maps as dilapidated concrete pad, decades old. Its really a modern pump/lift station, with a razor fence around it.
Google maps indicates the tile data is from 2025. The station has been there for 10+ years.
Even weirder, is that Bing maps shows the pump station proper.
And your other interests really coincide with mine. :)
France is particularly full of these kinds of sites, mostly having to do with their nuclear deterrent. If you want to see the interesting vertical silo storage they use for their SLBMs near the loading pier, you're best off using Yandex.
As someone who works in that exact field (literally - I produce seamless mosaicked global maps and work for a satellite company), I can assure you that we don't and can't do this (generate "fake" imagery). Depending on country the exact satellite is licensed through, some areas may be lower-res (e.g. sats licensed via Canada can't provide imagery in active conflict zones above a certain resolution). The US govt can in principle demand we stop imaging for US-licensed satellites (though they never have so far as I know). A lot of regulatory details can vary based on the country 1) your satellites are licensed in, 2) your company is based in, and 3) where you're selling data.
However, none of the imagery is "fake". Our imagery sometimes feeds into google maps, and I don't know google's exact processing chain, so I can't rule out them doing something like that. However, I'd be absolutely shocked if they were for a lot of different reasons.
It's _way_ more likely that the tile data is incorrectly indicating 2025. E.g. they're using 3rd party data that doesn't have detailed scene provenance information in that area and are just showing "2025" in the absence of other information.
More interesting is the things China and some other countries do around datums. If you process things correctly, your satellite data won't align with their official street/infrastructure maps. Instead it will be randomly and smoothly shifted in different directions across the country. That's to make on-the-ground targeting based on official maps much more difficult. E.g. you can't reliably take one of the official maps and go "point the artillery at an azimuth of 321.5 degrees and target a location 4567 meters away". However, it makes things really tough when you're trying to provide a correctly processed "backdrop" mosaic to Chinese customers. (IIRC, this problem has gone away due to the ubiquity of OSM data or regulations changed in recent years. Still, China in particular has a lot of interesting regulations around map accuracy.)
I would believe that Google and other "free" sites would be potentially under orders to edit tile data by federal mandate.
A colleague of mine back in the early 2000's put gas/water/sewer/electric maps on GIS. All from public sources. And within a few weeks, the feds caught wind of this and classified his combined maps.
Thats why I suspect editing on gas pump stations. And to be fair, they're ill-defended targets that could cause a massive chemical and pollutant spill if they were targeted (like the MAGAs shooting substations). And theres obvious national security aspects with shutting down energy grid operations.
Now yeah, there is the Chinese datum problem. But again, non-Chinese sat companies can map in accordance to their government in whichever country they are operating in.
Relevant PG&E: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/641b21b495f049c6958...
> (like the MAGAs shooting substations)
There's no need to partisanize this. There's a very famous 2013 one from right here in the Bay Area that AFAIK is still unsolved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
> And there's obvious national security aspects with shutting down energy grid operations.
This reminds me of visiting the Moffat Tunnel and being surprised by the heavy security labeled Department of Homeland Security of all things. Then I realized there's a giant pipe running alongside the tracks that carries the water supply for the entirety of Denver lol
Here's my pic of the east and west portals (respectively) from the last time I visited in 2022: https://i.imgur.com/sH0RNyg.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/fGdzV4G.jpeg
The big black fence around the east portal didn't used to be there, and you can see the DHS surveillance gantry right over the tracks. You can't get anywhere close enough to even read the plaque/dedication embedded on the right side of the portal. Hope you have a good telephoto lens!
On the west side, the DHS cameras are back to the left out of frame of the shot, at the very eastern edge of the Winter Park station platform. The water system is also much more visible on the west side than on the east side: https://earth.google.com/web/search/Winter+Park,+CO/@39.8871...
The east side is much less important-looking because it just becomes South Boulder Creek: https://earth.google.com/web/search/Winter+Park,+CO/@39.9022...
And here's one of my favorite hobo channels taking a ride through it westbound :) https://youtu.be/xNvnHAkm5dk?t=2715 and west portal emergence with the water pipe clearly in view: https://youtu.be/xNvnHAkm5dk?t=2787
Some of the airbases showed some fields where the actual jet bunkers are, and if you zoomed out you could see it was just a copy/paste of a field nearby. Total fakery.
They have stopped doing that since, probably because there is no point with the amount of imagery available today.
And yeah countries like China messing with their map datum is weird. And so easy to compensate that it serves no military purpose.
They have bought into mangled maps and it would be a challenge to update everything for simple lat/lon. It would be easier to get every car in China to drive on the left, for them to change their railway gauge to 7' 1/4" or to move to the Swatch Internet Time standard. Think of all the title deeds, utility maps and everything that you need surveyors for.
As for military purpose, have you ever done any work with the military? Even though every army plays a good ballistics game, they tend not to be mathematicians. I would not want it to be tested, but my hunch is the mangled maps would work extremely well, even though their foes have had decades to do their own map making.
All you need for this is to know whether the existing number corresponds to the old system or the new system and a piece of code that can convert from one to the other.
10 months ago there was an Ask HN: No planes visible at LHR on Google Maps Satellite view. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841727
No planes at all on the ground, none at any gates, none parked outside. I gave some thoughts (corona, bank holiday) but you would expect to see at least a couple. Seems like the imagery was altered: that someone did and can do that.
edits - another explanation could be that the airport was closed so that the plane taking the photos could fly over it.
By "we" I mean my company and my product does not do that. That part holds. (or, well, more precisely, that's a different product that I don't work on and isn't marketed as "imagery")
But yes, some other mosaic products are specifically requested with planes photoshopped out of airports and all waterbodies a consistent artificial color so that sunglint can be automatically simulated in flight sims for training pilots.
Because that data is often a high quality dataset available for purchase, sometimes google/etc reuses those datasets.
You'd think that procedurally generated scenery would be preference for most governments. It raises less awareness than a blur or missing tiles.
It was built more than three years ago.
Looks the same on Google and Bing. You can see it on Apple Maps though: https://maps.apple.com/place?coordinate=21.324794,-157.67986...
[1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/%22Robin+Masters+Estate%...
E.g. the same place in 2020,2021 is covered with a cloud, which never happens in a consumer-oriented maps.
This is generally the same in Korea, the title is wrong. The military bases are made to look like forests.
(Such as adversaries without their own satellite imagery capabilities, but with access to trucks, small arms, and crude explosives.)
If Google were censoring, but Microsoft wasn't, then maybe that's an oversight. (For example, maybe MS were told/asked to, but no one noticed that MS didn't, or that MS missed that spot.)
If you wanted to alert authorities to a possible oversight, I don't know who; maybe start by calling one of your congressperson's offices, and someone there could forward the info, or suggest who to call?
Apparently Pokemon Go was a major driver for OSM editors in Korea--Niantic used OSM and PokeStops wouldn't spawn due low quality OSM data.
> As a result, domestic technology firms like Naver and Kakao have cornered the market for mapping services, making navigation harder for foreign visitors unfamiliar with their platforms.
Oh no! Poor tourists have to download a different map app! Such inconvenience and hardship! It's the opposite. Whenever I go abroad and get to use a local app instead of a FAANG monstrosity, it's usually a delight.
And there is no better example than Maps. Even without knowing a lick of Korean, the discerning HN reader will immediately spot the difference in degree of enshittification with the two local market leaders [1]. Google Maps? Massive space to 3 companies that clearly paid the most for ads. I can't emphasize just how random the companies are, there's no other reason than ads that those are shown. The pictured area is tourist heavy, so plenty of Google Maps users. And dozens and dozens of establishment even just in the screenshot with 100x+ the visitors, including Google Maps searches, than the 3 companies that do get their own name and icon.
Everything else is a grey mess, unusable. Public transit, metro lines? Never heard of them. Different types of streets? Colors that make sense and increase readibility? Nope. Why? Again, go make the ads stand out more.
And unfortunately this is unrelated to Korea - Google Maps is this awful anywhere, as a result of being a monopolistic ads company. Such a prime example of why they need to be broken up.
The local map apps in Korea, Naver Maps and Kakao Maps, are the poster child of just how good it is for a society to protect themselves against the FAANGs. 50 million people get to use a much better navigation app thanks to it. In addition, it creates jobs and keeps all related revenue inside the country. Win-win-win. The only one who loses out is Google, and the few tourists who can't be bothered to install a local app (available in multiple languages, by the way). Even for those, it's not like Google Maps is banned; it's definitely functional. It has the public transit, it has the restaurants and so on.
Of course the pearl clutching by Korean mega-corporations that Google would behave monopolistically is pretty hard to take.
Simulacra•9h ago
gwbas1c•9h ago
jjani•5h ago
mparkms•5h ago
jjani•5h ago
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45185614
perihelions•8h ago
(It's arguably even actively counterproductive, since internationally there are people who[0] go tracking down blurred objects on satellite maps, and identifying what they are. The Streisand Effect of these regulations is to provide curated, military-certified alists of (1) what a military thinks is valuable enough it *ought* to be a secret, paired together with (2) the complete content of that secret).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w... ("List of satellite map images with missing or unclear data")