
Ask HN: How is Google policing screenshots of Google Maps? - jjeaff
I received a notice from Google regarding usage of Google maps without attribution. Which I ignored at first because we only use Google maps on our internal password protected site and we show all attribution. After another threat from Google that they would block our usage of the maps API if we didn&#x27;t comply, I did some searching around and some back and forth emails and found that they were referring to a screenshot taken of some streets in Google maps that was being used as a background image behind our contact form at the bottom of one of our pages.<p>So my question is, how is Google discovering usages of their images in this case? Are they using some type of steganography? It seems that they would need to automatically process far too many images for it to be worth the effort.
======
Bjartr
Google automatically processes every image on every site they crawl (that's
how google image search works). Doesn't seem like checking to see if a given
image is of maps would be too much additional effort.

~~~
jjeaff
They must have something embedded in the images to make them detectable in
that case. Because otherwise they would be trying to compare each image
against a huge amount of maps images that can have any number of modifications
like colors and roads and different points of interest toggled on and off.

~~~
timvdalen
They could be checking for presence of specific colors first and going into
more expensive comparison from there, if they're specifically targeting
screenshots.

