

Sorry, We Have No Imagery Here: When Google Earth Goes Blind - benbreen
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/investigating-censored-spots-on-google-earth

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devb
> Google Earth is prevented from showing the faces of real people, both living
> and dead. Colonel Sanders used to be one, which means that his smiling
> visage is blurred out on the logo of every one of the world's KFCs.

Pretty sure Google's face recognition just blurred those out as a matter of
pattern matching. If you look carefully in Street View you can see false
positives everywhere.

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cdr
Yes, I find parts of signs blurred out reasonably frequently. The only reason
I could conceive of for that is face blurring false positives.

~~~
thrownaway2424
I think the blurring of signs is a side effect of trying to blur out the
license plates of cars.

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jpatokal
I'm not sure some of those cases like Severnaya Zemlya are actually
"censored". These are _seriously_ remote, uninhabited islands near the North
Pole and little else, I suspect the commercially available satellite imagery
for them is just crappy (look at the pixelation for _anything_ in Russia at
those latitudes!) and there's no pressing reason to get better data. That
"giant gray bar" looks like data from a satellite flyover stripe failed for
some reason; if you were trying to intentionally hide something, you'd do it
on the postprocessed data like the Dutch seem to be doing.

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mikeyouse
The Wiki article about Severnaya Zemlya actually has a fairly high resolution
picture from NASA of the islands (albeit from 2001):

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Severnaya...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/SevernayaZemlya.jpg)

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gilgoomesh
Severnaya Zemlya probably isn't censored: it's just covered in ice nearly all
of the time. They needed to draw the outline because you can't see the edge of
the land clearly under the ice.

Here's what it looks like:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SevernayaZemlya.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SevernayaZemlya.jpg)

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drdeadringer
About 10 years back, I remember a coworker and I discussing my next
assignment's location, a naval shipyard, over Google Maps.

"Well the ferry is here, and -- oh, the shipyard is blurred. I wonder if the
base up north is too."

"There are two bases that close?"

"Well, one's the shipyard, and the other one... up here? No... ah here... is
where they load in the nuclear missiles."

"... but that's not blurred."

"Um, right. I think they should have that reversed. Huh." [Zooms in] "So this
building here is actually several stories tall, because they have to load the
missiles vertically, and..."

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patrickyeon
Reminds me of one of my favourite Wikipedia lists:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_map_images_with_missi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_map_images_with_missing_or_unclear_data)

It's fun that some of the sites have useable imagery on one service but not
another.

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iancarroll
A while back I submitted a request to have our house blurred and it was
granted. A contractor came out a few months later to do some work and was
wondering why our house wasn't loading properly - pretty funny.

It makes me wonder if I could simply censor any house in my city. How could
they verify that I own the house?

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liotier
The dutch censored military installations are perfectly visible in Bing
Maps... I don't understand what they are thinking.

I was surprised that the Marcoule breeder plants are actually blurred in both
Google and Bing.

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Doctor_Fegg
Yeah, but censoring in Bing Maps is a bit "if a tree falls in a forest"...

~~~
scrollaway
But then who do they censor it for? "Enemies of the nation"? Do they really
think they'll just look at google and be like "Oh well, we tried"?

It's pretty idiotic. Build your systems with the foresight that they can be
observed from space; just like software engineers build their systems with the
foresight that they can be snooped on by the NSA and such.

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elleferrer
I had this issue when using Google Earth to revisit my trips to the
Philippines - some of the locations were blurred on Google Earth. I found an
alternative using [http://www.flashearth.com/](http://www.flashearth.com/)
that uses NASA Aqua, NASA Terra, Bing Maps, HERE Maps, Earth at Night, ArcGIS,
and MapQuest.

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rdtsc
I've always wondered how governments approach Google/Bing/etc. asking for
"small favors" like these. Is there a special number they need to call. Do
they have to use threats "We'll block you at the firewall if you don't blur
it!" or just ask nicely.

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mrweasel
Pretty much all of the sites are perfectly visible in Bing maps, so if it's
actual censorship it's a bit weird.

Other governments or large organisations would have to much trouble getting
arial photos of pretty much any censored sites, so it's not really effective
anyway.

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dchest
No longer obscured: The Royal Palace of Amsterdam, Chekhov, Gabčíkovo Power
Plant.

