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.)

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.

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.

>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.

> 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...

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.