Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by quad_eye_oh 1100 days ago
That's Chinese map data obfuscation. The idea is to make it marginally harder for an adversary to target missiles using public map data.
1 comments

Which is useless in this day. I was in China last week and Google Map’s street layer was aligned correctly to where I was, but the satellite imagery was not.

This demonstrates that Google already knows the correct coordinates of street in China, including those of an airport finished in 2021. For some reason they have spent no time manually aligning the imagery.

Coordinates on the globe are constant whether China likes it or not, my only guess is that Google doesn’t want to spend time fixing data in a country that blocks them entirely.

The wiki above explains it. Technically they are supposed to purchase a shift algorithm.
Google is doing no business in China, so they don’t “have to.” They could easily bypass that by internally mapping the imagery to the vectors, they have thousands of developers who could do this.

Even if they had to buy it, they’re not buying it because again they don’t do business there.

Who does Google buy map data within China from?