[ajakate]

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...

[thrdbndndn]

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]

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.

[dan-robertson]

I don’t think it was “just” that as I think they also improved/updated the map data which was likely a lot of work.

[webmobdev]

> 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]

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.

[webmobdev]

I should have specifically mentioned that I was talking about India - Street view was not allowed till now because the indian government wanted to study the matter more deeply before framing policies for it. To understand the hesitancy of the government, recall if you've come across any secure government facilities any where in the world. Most such infrastructure will have a common warning painted or posted publicly stating "Photography is prohibited / not allowed". Allowing the process of collecting street view data (i.e. taking photographs / videos of a locality) by foreign companies would make such warning redundant and a joke, even if they didn't use the data in their applications - they are not even supposed to have such data in the first place.

[saagarjha]

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

[webmobdev]

Here, I feel India has found a nice compromise - indian companies are allowed to get license to collect the street data, and others (including foreign companies like Google), can license it from them. This takes care of security concerns of the governments, creates more jobs, fosters a more competitive business environment (Google alone won't have the street data) and western investors can be relieved that the aim wasn't protectionism.

[bigDinosaur]

The security issues all would stem from the imagery simply being available to the public at all (and even then it's a stretch, most criminals/terrorists whatever will likely scout an area before doing anything anyway). I don't see how adding intermediaries adds the slightest bit of security at all. Could you expand on why you think it would?

As for Google collecting data itself, it's only collecting photographic imagery that anyone else can.

[webmobdev]

Google was funded by the CIA ( https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci... ). It was part of the PRISM project where American Tech companies worked with US intelligence services to share data with them. India (or any country for that matter) would be fools to allow Google vans or any similar setup from a foreign company to allow them to scan an area (do electronic surveillance) and give them a blatant pass to photograph and spy on secure government facilities on behalf of US agencies. (US agencies that have worked to sabotage India's R&D in the past).

As I ELI5-ed in another comment:

To understand the hesitancy of the government, recall if you've come across any secure government facilities any where in the world - most such infrastructure will have a common warning painted or posted publicly stating "Photography is prohibited / not allowed". Allowing the process of collecting street view data (i.e. taking photographs / videos of a locality) by foreign companies would make such warning redundant and a joke, even if they didn't use the data in their applications - they are not even supposed to have such data in the first place.

Yes, terrorist and spies can certainly try to reconnaissance a secure facility themselves. But obviously the job will be harder to do undetected given the security guards and cameras. In fact, in the 26/11 terrorist attack on Mumbai, one of the terrorists caught mentioned that they had used Google Earth to familiarise themselves with the locality before they attacked - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks . Once that was revealed, there were immediately comments on how Google Satellite view is a threat to indian security. But the indian government didn't ban Google Maps satellite views because they understood this technology has become mainstream and they just reviewed their security policies and adapted it. With street views too, the government has finally come up with a decent policy - allow indian companies to collect and process the data, let the intelligence agencies review the data to remove sensitive information or even put in fake data to confuse anyone with nefarious intentions against India, and then allow anyone (including foreign companies) to license and use the data. That's a very decent compromise that Google should be happy with.

[abraham]

Google announced they would no longer collect wifi info with street view vehicles.

https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collec...

[fomine3]

In 2010, it's expected that Android will take majority market share of smartphone. I think Google no longer needed to collect such data for wifi geolocation from vehicle .

[solardev]

Google has a bad history of making "innocent" mistakes like this, always in favor of data collection. They just happened to be caught that time.