These maps are heating up

Something interesting is happening in South Korea. 

Okay let’s be honest, plenty of interesting things are happening in South Korea: new beauty treatments involving salmon DNA, a record $2B (yeah, B!) divorce settlement, and a mission to determine if Kim Jong Un has a secret son (Kim Jong Son?).

But that’s not what we’re talking about today (soz K-Beauty fans). Rather, we’re taking a closer look at why South Korean Google Maps users will soon see some blurred areas on their screens. 

So here are the 4 most intriguing Google Maps “quirks”, starting with…

1. Sensitive sites 

Google has finally begun blurring satellite imagery of key US and Korean military sites on the Peninsula, including the Ministry of National Defense, the THAAD base, and surveillance outposts along the border’s demilitarised zone with North Korea.

Domestic rivals such as Naver and Kakao already obscure sensitive sites, sneakily disguising them as forests, but Google long refused to comply, citing its preference for a single, high-quality global product. So… what changed? Two things.

First, Korea’s prize simply got too big for Big Tech to ignore: with Google blocked from exporting local high-res map data to foreign servers, Korea’s own map players cornered the turn-by-turn directions market, leaving Google Maps as the exclusive purview of baffled (and lost) foreign tourists. And when you corner directions, you also corner the related plumbing: ads, reviews, operating systems, AI.

Second, Google’s ‘single quality product’ line wore thin:

As far back as 1997, the US was already forcing its own satellite firms to curb the quality of their Israel imagery, citing a natsec request from Israeli authorities. That law only got relaxed in 2020 when it was clear non-US firms had already closed the gap, though Google has been notably slow in updating those Israeli maps.

It’s also reportedly been lowering the resolution over India’s sensitive sites since ~2007, and blurred more Belgian sites from 2018 amid threats of a lawsuit.

Plus add that to sites already blurred across Britain, France, Indonesia, Poland, and Portugal — while Aussies and Germans can get their homes blurred from Street View for privacy reasons — and that’s Insta influencer levels of blur filter everywhere.

But while we’re here, why all the trouble? Governments say it’s about security, though of course any rival government can now get its own decent satellite imagery. So realistically this is about managing risks from (say) terrorists and criminals.

But fun counter: Singapore has long argued it won’t demand blurring, because doing so actually just highlights sensitive locations! Classic Streisand effect, which is funny until you realise it’s happened: US nukes nerd Matt Korda famously used the blurring in Russia’s Yandex Maps to map 300+ secret sites across Turkey and Israel!

So okay, that’s map blurring, but what about clean, simple lines?

2. Disputed borders

Disputes happen, but Google’s solution? Let’s call it ‘bespoke’, shall we?

Solution 1 is to just draw spicy borders with light dashed lines to signal that “the neighbours don’t agree”: think Kashmir, Arunachal, and Western Sahara.

Solution 2 is to show different maps in different countries! For example, users inside Morocco (which claims Western Sahara) see a full, no-notes, chiselled-from-granite-by-God-himself line.

In many cases Google doesn’t have much of a choice, given local laws that make it illegal to show the preferred maps. And it doesn’t take much to trigger the dotted-line threshold — eg, Spain has controlled Ceuta for half a millennium, but Morocco still wants it so in go the dots.

Sometimes the causation flows the other way: back in 2010, a small contingent of Nicaraguan troops entered Costa Rican territory to carry out a dredging project. When confronted about the um, invasion, Managua pointed out that Google Maps marked the disputed island as Nicaraguan territory! Google issued an apology.

So okay, the blurring is tricky, and the lines get dotty, but then there’s…

3. Disputed names

You say potato, I say tomato, Brits say Boaty McBoatface.

But then… is it the Persian Gulf, or the Arabian Gulf? The East Sea, or the Sea of Japan? And now we’ve got to add Lake Ontario vs Lake America?

It’s normal for different languages to use different names, but the battle is really about what everyone else accepts as the real name. And Google Maps mostly tries to skirt trouble by showing both names (with the less common in parentheses), though even that is often making a specific geopolitical claim.

So you know what? It’s all a bit complicated, maybe we should just…

4. Ban Google Maps 

At least… that’s what China has effectively done with its Great Firewall, with Maps getting caught in Google’s refusal to keep censoring Search results, particularly after Beijing got caught hacking dissident Gmail accounts. Foreign tourists visiting China get a kind of stale, unlicensed map layer.

North Korea then said hold my soju, and mostly banned the entire internet. Officials and elites get an ultra-surveiled sliver.

Meanwhile, Syrian diaspora communities are still lobbying Mountain View to unleash the full Maps functionality now that the Assad-era sanctions are dropping.

And Cuba gets near-zero functionality, though that’s partly because Google hasn’t wanted to invest in a market it can’t bill, let alone one subject to evolving embargos.

Anyway, Google Maps may be free, but lots of the key details are not.