Google to obey South Korean order to blur satellite images on maps

https://www.barrons.com/news/google-to-obey-south-korean-order-to-blur-satellite-images-on-maps-653e934e

by gnabgib • 11 months ago

129 99 11 months ago

Simulacra• 11 months ago

Couldn't another company do this that's not as international as Google?

gwbas1c• 11 months ago

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.

jjani6• 11 months ago

And making navigation better for the 50 million Korean residents who get to deal with mapping apps that aren't enshittified to the nth degree to optimize ad revenue and nothing but that.

perihelions6• 11 months ago

Yes; it's an absurd law. Anyone looking for unblurred satellite photos of South Korea can trivially find them on any number of international services who are not Google. Google is complying with this law, which is absurd, in order to negotiate export-controlled GIS data from South Korea—it needs those to make Google Maps competitive with South Korean consumers. The net result is Google will now blur a couple buildings; other websites will not; and incompetent bureaucrats will continuing failing upwards, doing useless things.

(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")

bryanhogan• 11 months ago

Do I understand correctly that this just means that military zones will be blurred?

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.

perihelions6• 11 months ago

That's how I parse the subsequent quote later in the article,

"...oogle would "invest a lot of time and resources" to remove the coordinates of security facilities from its maps."

zamadatix• 11 months ago

I dunno if it means solely military zones or not, e.g. maybe certain key government buildings might be blurred/hidden/obfuscated too. The article seems very light on details.

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.

ctphipps2• 11 months ago

Residents might, but the huge number of international visitors who rely on Google Maps wherever they go won't need to go hunting for alternatives when arriving in South Korea. And the other parts of the Google ecosystem that rely on Maps will start to function in South Korea again.

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.

wkat42425• 11 months ago

Yeah it's weird. A lot of countries try to interfere with global mapping anyway. Like China which has its entire country at an offset by using a slighly offset datum standard.

It's called the China GPS Shift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

notyourwork• 11 months ago

Facts like this make me realize how peculiar things you have a general idea about are. Thanks for sharing, I learned something new today.

supriyo-biswas• 11 months ago

And there's an unofficial implementation of a mapping function https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform

zamalek• 11 months ago

Yeah it's weird.

When you consider SK's neighbors, and their neighbors' ambitions, it really isn't at all.

wkat42425• 11 months ago

Yes but they (especially China who will share with NK anyway) have enough satellites of their own, they don't need Google.

hengheng• 11 months ago

It's the same with military sites in France, where satellite images are blurred but you still get street view, and if that doesn't exist, you can still look at ground level photos, like so https://maps.app.goo.gl/Kr2822pASFRPLJHR7

Compliance is fun.

rtkwe• 11 months ago

Aerial images that look down to the inside courtyards etc of a location are different than Streetview which just shows the same view someone could get walking by.

perihelions6• 11 months ago

France tried in the past to censor information about their sensitive facilities on Wikipedia, too. In 2013, their intelligence agency detained a random admin who was a French national, and forced them to use their credentials to make an edit in front of them,

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.")

trillic3• 11 months ago

Another weird French one

https://www.google.com/maps/place/46%C2%B046'51.6%22N+56%C2%...

ctphipps2• 11 months ago

French as in language alone...

perihelions6• 11 months ago

It's probably this small jail,

https://www.google.com/maps/@46.7812199,-56.1705941,3a,46.7y...

preisschild• 11 months ago

They also do that for their civilian nuclear power plants unfortunately

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gravelines+Nuclear+Power+S...

dhx• 11 months ago

What caused France to seemingly start this practice in 2020? ESRI's 2020 August basemap includes a 50cm unblurred Maxar WV02 image of Gravelines Nuclear Power Station captured on Aug 17, 2016.[1] In their 2020 September basemap revision, the same image from Maxar WV02 is then blurred.

The image chosen by ESRI (and since blurred) for their basemap until they switched it to a Jun 3, 2023 Maxar GE01 alternative image was:[2]

Catalog ID: 1030050053F98A00 Sensor: WV2 Resolution: 50 cm Min Resolution: 0.57593 Max Resolution: 0.60326 Acquisition Date: 08-17-2016 Acquisition Time: 11:18:32.379526 UTC Off-Nadir: 29.8° Sun Azimuth: 165.3° Target Az. Min: 0° Target Az. Max: 0° Target Az.: 0° Sun Elevation: 52.0° Cloud Cover: 5% Band Count: 8

If someone were to order and pay for this specific archived satellite imagery through a reseller, would it be blurred? What about newer imagery that ESRI etc haven't added to their basemaps(s)? Seemingly the blurring is being done by the likes of Google, ESRI, etc who supply public basemap imagery, and not by the organisation/company collecting the imagery off the satellite constellation?

With the expansion of China's fleet of optical and radar satellites (such as Siwei Gaojing-1 at a claimed 20-30cm resolution), is there an agreement amongst China, US, Europe, Japan (and other countries) that China will blur French power stations, and Europe will blur Chinese power stations in return? If not, I suppose anyone that cares for it will use American/European satellite imagery providers for imagery of China, and Chinese imagery providers for imagery of the US/Europe.

[1] https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/wayback/#mapCenter=2.13709%2C...

[2] https://imagehunter-api.apollomapping.com/static/img/preview...

perihelions6• 11 months ago

Alternative link to the identical (AFP) article, if anyone has technical issues with the barrons.com (progressive-loading) site:

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/google-to-obey-s...

iamtedd• 11 months ago

Thanks. That Barron's put a paywall message directly after a passage that explaining that the article is entirely an AFP production is some subtle irony.

bapak• 11 months ago

Wasn't that always the case? I was in Seoul in 2016 and Google Maps wasn't even allowed to be vectorial there.

trillic3• 11 months ago

List of satellite map images with missing or unclear data

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w...

mattlutze• 11 months ago

For the longest time there were plenty of locations in the US that were also blurred. The Naval Observatory, Vice President's residence/office in DC, for example.

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.

phendrenad2• 11 months ago

This isn't really the best reporting on the situation.

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?

mystraline4• 11 months ago

How about a better solution, which is to provide equal access to everyone, be they some local company, OSM, Google, Bing or whoever?

And its not a "security issue". Only way that would be true is if they have a countrywide tarp across the country. /sarcasm

JKCalhoun• 11 months ago

I guess a minor detail of the deal is that certain things will be blurred? I assume military bases?

That can't be the case — blurry billboards saying essentially, "Nothing to see here!"

j_maffe• 11 months ago

blurry everything.

aerostable_slug2• 11 months ago

That's effectively what Israel has. America forces a maximum satellite resolution on any commercial providers that want to play ball with .gov buyers (which is all of them, since .gov is a huge customer of commercial imagery).

jhanschoo• 11 months ago

Quote 1:

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.

0cf8612b2e1e• 11 months ago

I assume if you really want this data for military purposes, you have enough budget to do something beyond free Google maps output. There are many commercial providers who are already taking pictures of the globe.

devsda• 11 months ago

They apparently had no problem giving map data to local SK companies, however, so essentially those companies had an unfair advantage.

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 ?

GuB-42• 11 months ago

Maybe, maybe not. But it makes a lot of sense as for why it was discussed in the context of tariff negotiations. Tariffs are also an "unfair advantage" and letting American companies compete on mapping is likely to be part of the deal.

But a trade agreement doesn't mean that Google will get to disregard South Korean national security rules, so, blurring.

papichulo2023• 11 months ago

This reminds me SK making Twitch to pay for user's traffic while local competitors dont have to. I wonder why other countries dont retaliate.

TheRealPomax• 11 months ago

Retaliate for... what? The whole point of "countries" is that other countries don't get to tell them how to run their country, unless there is a legally binding consortium agreement. If SK wants to make it hard or impossible for foreign countries to compete, that's literally up to them. It's their country. They make the rules.

jjani6• 11 months ago

You do realize that a country like the US does the same in many ways, just less on the nose - until 2 years ago that is, now doing even more blatantly than SK? And most of the countries in the world put up all sorts of visible and invisble barriers?

reaperducer• 11 months ago

because of "security concerns".

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.

ronsor• 11 months ago

I don't think North Korea is hindered by the lack of Google Maps. Their only real target, Seoul, has a very known location.

josefresco• 11 months ago

Years ago I requested Google blur my house on Street View - it still is. Granted, every other mapping service has satellite photos of my house but I'm just surprised they still honor it.

RajT88• 11 months ago

This is probably because in the absence of a space program, North Korea uses Google maps for surveilling it's rivals.

(I kid, I kid. I am sure they have access to Chinese spy satellite data)

tokai• 11 months ago

Russian data is more probable. Seeing they are military allies.

newsclues• 11 months ago

It's not like NK can't get uncensored imagery from Russia or China, or commercial access.

mystraline4• 11 months ago

In the USA, sensitive sites are not hidden by blur, but instead by fake scenery generation.

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.

newman8r• 11 months ago

Probably possible to cross reference bing and google imagery to get a complete list of the spots they don't want people to see.

mystraline4• 11 months ago

Can you add contact info? I'd be glad to privately share 1 of these sites.

And your other interests really coincide with mine. :)

aerostable_slug2• 11 months ago

Yandex too.

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.

jofer3• 11 months ago

More likely, the date attribution in the imagery is incorrect.

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.)

mystraline4• 11 months ago

I dont think the sat photography companies are providing false or manipulated data.

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.

wkat42425• 11 months ago

Not sure about Google but on Bing Maps they were definitely messing around with fake images.

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.

cyp0633• 11 months ago

Chinese coordinates definitely can be converted to WGS-84 - it's Google that did not do that. Look at Shenzhen River in OpenStreetMap, the streets of Hong Kong and Shenzhen align with each other perfectly.

thinkingemote2• 11 months ago

we don't and can't do this

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.

N19PEDL2• 10 months ago

More interesting is the things China and some other countries do around datums.

Here's detailed info about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

general1465• 11 months ago

It is like that for European maps too. i.e. military bases for many countries are blurred Google Maps, but when you will use some local maps, like mapy.com they are not.

snerbles• 11 months ago

One specific example was Camp Bucca in 2007, around the time local insurgents managed to successfully inflict casualties with a rocket attack [0]. In an onboarding briefing I recall some officers lamenting the delay in getting Google to "delete" the base from Maps, though I am unsure if there are any public sources that reflect this.

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6737159.stm

johnbellone• 11 months ago

Anyone know if there's a reason why it is different?

You'd think that procedurally generated scenery would be preference for most governments. It raises less awareness than a blur or missing tiles.

coolspot3• 11 months ago

Likewise, Obama’s new house in Hawaii is shown as empty lot: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pKKkR17trBiz7b9w6?g_st=ipc

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...

stordoff• 11 months ago

It looks like Google Maps is using old imagery for some reason. If you look on Google Earth, the image used appears to be from 12 Jan 2016[1]. The more recent imagery (2022 onwards) shows the new build, and you can see glimpses of it in Street View on Google Maps.

[1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/%22Robin+Masters+Estate%...

codedokode• 11 months ago

It might be reasonable to protect Mr. Obama's house image. But why not protect commoners' houses equally?

jjani6• 11 months ago

In the USA, sensitive sites are not hidden by blur, but instead by fake scenery generation.

This is generally the same in Korea, the title is wrong. The military bases are made to look like forests.

groby_b• 11 months ago

The funny implication here is that this requires governments to ship a complete list of sensitive geolocations. (I have no direct knowledge if that is indeed true, but it sure seems like a prerequisite)

wiml• 11 months ago

Reminds me of the hoops the Vera Rubin Telescope has to jump through to release imagery, submitting each image to the NSA for possible embargo:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42301224

seanmcdirmid• 11 months ago

I wonder if they could just Stable diffusion for that. "Hey, we have to obscure this sector, so generate something plausible based on adjacent tiles."

neilv• 11 months ago

Would you support censoring the publicly available imagery of "asymmetric" vulnerabilities like that, against a number of less-sophisticated national security adversaries?

(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?

speckx• 11 months ago

I was going to say, you can use alternatives, and they will show you what's blurred or has changed.

noman-land• 11 months ago

Pleease link to this. It would be interesting to see.

dudeinjapan• 11 months ago

Here's a good read on OpenStreetMap in Korea (use Google Translate) https://medium.com/seoul-libre-maps/%EB%94%94%EC%A7%80%ED%84...

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.

jjani6• 11 months ago

Finally, my time has come! A topic I'm both very passionate about and have a lot of experience with.

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.

[1] https://ibb.co/hJkL3xRY

Sporktacular3• 11 months ago

Naver and Kakao lists businesses for free but offers paid services to businesses for enhanced visibility and operations. Their combined annual revenues is around 10 billion USD. And the apps still suck. They could do with some competition.

jjani6• 11 months ago

The screenshot gives a 1:1 comparison that directly contradicts what you're implying: the difference in that "enhanced visibility" is incomparable. On Google, they're not just enhanced, they're the only things shown on the entire map. On Naver and Kakao, they're not even highlighted.

Sporktacular3• 11 months ago

Pretty good summary of the arguments here: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/05/travel/south-korea-google...

Of course the pearl clutching by Korean mega-corporations that Google would behave monopolistically is pretty hard to take.

ur-whale• 11 months ago

https://maps.yandex.com

mauriciolange• 11 months ago

This can be seen in action here in Europe. Near Antwerp, in Kruibeke, we stumbled upon a military base when deviating from the A14 to fill the tank. The whole area is blurred in google maps.

seoulbigchris• 11 months ago

I just did a spot check, since I live very near an airport. The airport is blurred / obscured on Naver and Kakao Maps. Google maps and Google Earth still show the actual imagery. I guess Google's blurring hasn't begun yet.

Google to obey South Korean order to blur satellite images on maps

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