Google to Obey South Korean Order to Blur Satellite Images on Maps
64 comments
·September 9, 2025mystraline
jofer
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.)
mystraline
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.
Lammy
> All from public sources.
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
wkat4242
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
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.
coolspot
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
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%...
newman8r
Probably possible to cross reference bing and google imagery to get a complete list of the spots they don't want people to see.
aerostable_slug
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.
mystraline
Can you add contact info? I'd be glad to privately share 1 of these sites.
And your other interests really coincide with mine. :)
snerbles
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.
jjani
> 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.
johnbellone
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.
general1465
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.
groby_b
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)
phendrenad2
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?
jhanschoo
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.
papichulo2023
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.
jjani
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?
TheRealPomax
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.
JKCalhoun
> 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!"
devsda
> 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
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.
reaperducer
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
I don't think North Korea is hindered by the lack of Google Maps. Their only real target, Seoul, has a very known location.
j_maffe
blurry everything.
aerostable_slug
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).
mystraline
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
wkat4242
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...
supriyo-biswas
And there's an unofficial implementation of a mapping function https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform
notyourwork
Facts like this make me realize how peculiar things you have a general idea about are. Thanks for sharing, I learned something new today.
hengheng
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.
perihelions
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.")
trillic
Another weird French one
https://www.google.com/maps/place/46%C2%B046'51.6%22N+56%C2%...
perihelions
It's probably this small jail,
https://www.google.com/maps/@46.7812199,-56.1705941,3a,46.7y...
rtkwe
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.
preisschild
They also do that for their civilian nuclear power plants unfortunately
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gravelines+Nuclear+Power+S...
trillic
List of satellite map images with missing or unclear data
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w...
josefresco
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.
perihelions
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...
null
mattlutze
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.
bryanhogan
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.
ctphipps
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.
zamadatix
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.
perihelions
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."
bapak
Wasn't that always the case? I was in Seoul in 2016 and Google Maps wasn't even allowed to be vectorial there.
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.