Yes; it's an absurd law. Anyone looking for unblurred satellite photos of South Korea can trivially find them on any number of international services who are not Google. Google is complying with this law, which is absurd, in order to negotiate export-controlled GIS data from South Korea—it needs those to make Google Maps competitive with South Korean consumers. The net result is Google will now blur a couple buildings; other websites will not; and incompetent bureaucrats will continuing failing upwards, doing useless things.

(It's arguably even actively counterproductive, since internationally there are people who[0] go tracking down blurred objects on satellite maps, and identifying what they are. The Streisand Effect of these regulations is to provide curated, military-certified alists of (1) what a military thinks is valuable enough it *ought* to be a secret, paired together with (2) the complete content of that secret).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w... ("List of satellite map images with missing or unclear data")

> As a result, domestic technology firms like Naver and Kakao have cornered the market for mapping services, making navigation harder for foreign visitors unfamiliar with their platforms.