Sorry, We Have No Imagery Here: When Google Earth Goes Blind

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/investigating-censored-spots-on-google-earth

by benbreen • 12 years ago

48 17 12 years ago

iancarroll• 12 years ago

A while back I submitted a request to have our house blurred and it was granted. A contractor came out a few months later to do some work and was wondering why our house wasn't loading properly - pretty funny.

It makes me wonder if I could simply censor any house in my city. How could they verify that I own the house?

patrickyeon• 12 years ago

Reminds me of one of my favourite Wikipedia lists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_map_images_with_missi...

It's fun that some of the sites have useable imagery on one service but not another.

jpatokal• 12 years ago

I'm not sure some of those cases like Severnaya Zemlya are actually "censored". These are seriously remote, uninhabited islands near the North Pole and little else, I suspect the commercially available satellite imagery for them is just crappy (look at the pixelation for anything in Russia at those latitudes!) and there's no pressing reason to get better data. That "giant gray bar" looks like data from a satellite flyover stripe failed for some reason; if you were trying to intentionally hide something, you'd do it on the postprocessed data like the Dutch seem to be doing.

mikeyouse• 12 years ago

The Wiki article about Severnaya Zemlya actually has a fairly high resolution picture from NASA of the islands (albeit from 2001):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Severnaya...

devb• 12 years ago

Google Earth is prevented from showing the faces of real people, both living and dead. Colonel Sanders used to be one, which means that his smiling visage is blurred out on the logo of every one of the world's KFCs.

Pretty sure Google's face recognition just blurred those out as a matter of pattern matching. If you look carefully in Street View you can see false positives everywhere.

cdr• 12 years ago

Yes, I find parts of signs blurred out reasonably frequently. The only reason I could conceive of for that is face blurring false positives.

scottlocklin• 12 years ago

I've been meaning to fiddle with the Viola Jones filter...

thrownaway2424• 12 years ago

I think the blurring of signs is a side effect of trying to blur out the license plates of cars.

gilgoomesh• 12 years ago

Severnaya Zemlya probably isn't censored: it's just covered in ice nearly all of the time. They needed to draw the outline because you can't see the edge of the land clearly under the ice.

Here's what it looks like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SevernayaZemlya.jpg

rdtsc• 12 years ago

I've always wondered how governments approach Google/Bing/etc. asking for "small favors" like these. Is there a special number they need to call. Do they have to use threats "We'll block you at the firewall if you don't blur it!" or just ask nicely.

mrweasel• 12 years ago

Pretty much all of the sites are perfectly visible in Bing maps, so if it's actual censorship it's a bit weird.

Other governments or large organisations would have to much trouble getting arial photos of pretty much any censored sites, so it's not really effective anyway.

liotier• 12 years ago

The dutch censored military installations are perfectly visible in Bing Maps... I don't understand what they are thinking.

I was surprised that the Marcoule breeder plants are actually blurred in both Google and Bing.

Doctor_Fegg• 12 years ago

Yeah, but censoring in Bing Maps is a bit "if a tree falls in a forest"...

scrollaway• 12 years ago

But then who do they censor it for? "Enemies of the nation"? Do they really think they'll just look at google and be like "Oh well, we tried"?

It's pretty idiotic. Build your systems with the foresight that they can be observed from space; just like software engineers build their systems with the foresight that they can be snooped on by the NSA and such.

drdeadringer• 12 years ago

About 10 years back, I remember a coworker and I discussing my next assignment's location, a naval shipyard, over Google Maps.

"Well the ferry is here, and -- oh, the shipyard is blurred. I wonder if the base up north is too."

"There are two bases that close?"

"Well, one's the shipyard, and the other one... up here? No... ah here... is where they load in the nuclear missiles."

"... but that's not blurred."

"Um, right. I think they should have that reversed. Huh." [Zooms in] "So this building here is actually several stories tall, because they have to load the missiles vertically, and..."

dchest• 12 years ago

No longer obscured: The Royal Palace of Amsterdam, Chekhov, Gabčíkovo Power Plant.

elleferrer• 12 years ago

I had this issue when using Google Earth to revisit my trips to the Philippines - some of the locations were blurred on Google Earth. I found an alternative using http://www.flashearth.com/ that uses NASA Aqua, NASA Terra, Bing Maps, HERE Maps, Earth at Night, ArcGIS, and MapQuest.

Sorry, We Have No Imagery Here: When Google Earth Goes Blind

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