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ajakate | 3 years ago

It's interesting to see how certain regulatory requirements of countries can disrupt the ubiquity of google maps. For the longest time South Korea looked completely different when you zoomed in on it in google maps. South Korea didn't want high-resolution map information to fall into the wrong hands, so they disallowed storing that kind of map data on foreign servers. I believe it was also hard/impossible to get driving directions [1].

Curiously, I just checked gmaps and it appears to look normal now. This must have happened in the past few months, not sure why I can't seem to find any info online.

[1]https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/one-thing-north-k...

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thrdbndndn|3 years ago

I was somehow obsessed with this issue a few years ago for no good reason (I don't live in SK or have any tie to it), and wrote dozens of "feedbacks" to Google, despite knowing nothing would change. I guess I was just unreasonably irritated by this "imperfection".

Anyway, it was fixed/changed last year! https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/rb6gua/google_m...

CSMastermind|3 years ago

I'm pretty sure the "fix" just involved them building a cloud center in the country and serving all the SK map data from there to get around the regulation. Unless something changed with the law itself that I'm unaware of.

webmobdev|3 years ago

> It's interesting to see how certain regulatory requirements of countries can disrupt the ubiquity of google maps.

It was done for the right reasons - security. You don't want foreign governments to have data on physical government assets, especially military and critical infrastructure. Moreover, the Google street view vans also collect other data (including scanning for WiFi networks and collecting associated metadata) - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285928324_The_Googl... ... I think it also collected atmospheric data (pollution levels etc).

drivebycomment|3 years ago

Security was a blatant and transparent excuse for their protectionism. The same information has been and is available for practically anyone in the world, thanks to many different map service providers, satellite image providers, and even Korean map service companies making their service available outside Korea.

saagarjha|3 years ago

Security is a reason. It’s not always the right decision.