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.

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.)

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

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

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...

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?

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.

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.

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)

> 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.

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."

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

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

[dead]