Nearby where I live, there is an oil pipeline pump/monitor station. Shows up on Google maps as dilapidated concrete pad, decades old. Its really a modern pump/lift station, with a razor fence around it.
Google maps indicates the tile data is from 2025. The station has been there for 10+ years.
Even weirder, is that Bing maps shows the pump station proper.
As someone who works in that exact field (literally - I produce seamless mosaicked global maps and work for a satellite company), I can assure you that we don't and can't do this (generate "fake" imagery). Depending on country the exact satellite is licensed through, some areas may be lower-res (e.g. sats licensed via Canada can't provide imagery in active conflict zones above a certain resolution). The US govt can in principle demand we stop imaging for US-licensed satellites (though they never have so far as I know). A lot of regulatory details can vary based on the country 1) your satellites are licensed in, 2) your company is based in, and 3) where you're selling data.
However, none of the imagery is "fake". Our imagery sometimes feeds into google maps, and I don't know google's exact processing chain, so I can't rule out them doing something like that. However, I'd be absolutely shocked if they were for a lot of different reasons.
It's _way_ more likely that the tile data is incorrectly indicating 2025. E.g. they're using 3rd party data that doesn't have detailed scene provenance information in that area and are just showing "2025" in the absence of other information.
More interesting is the things China and some other countries do around datums. If you process things correctly, your satellite data won't align with their official street/infrastructure maps. Instead it will be randomly and smoothly shifted in different directions across the country. That's to make on-the-ground targeting based on official maps much more difficult. E.g. you can't reliably take one of the official maps and go "point the artillery at an azimuth of 321.5 degrees and target a location 4567 meters away". However, it makes things really tough when you're trying to provide a correctly processed "backdrop" mosaic to Chinese customers. (IIRC, this problem has gone away due to the ubiquity of OSM data or regulations changed in recent years. Still, China in particular has a lot of interesting regulations around map accuracy.)
I would believe that Google and other "free" sites would be potentially under orders to edit tile data by federal mandate.
A colleague of mine back in the early 2000's put gas/water/sewer/electric maps on GIS. All from public sources. And within a few weeks, the feds caught wind of this and classified his combined maps.
Thats why I suspect editing on gas pump stations. And to be fair, they're ill-defended targets that could cause a massive chemical and pollutant spill if they were targeted (like the MAGAs shooting substations). And theres obvious national security aspects with shutting down energy grid operations.
Now yeah, there is the Chinese datum problem. But again, non-Chinese sat companies can map in accordance to their government in whichever country they are operating in.
Relevant PG&E: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/641b21b495f049c6958...
> (like the MAGAs shooting substations)
There's no need to partisanize this. There's a very famous 2013 one from right here in the Bay Area that AFAIK is still unsolved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
> And there's obvious national security aspects with shutting down energy grid operations.
This reminds me of visiting the Moffat Tunnel and being surprised by the heavy security labeled Department of Homeland Security of all things. Then I realized there's a giant pipe running alongside the tracks that carries the water supply for the entirety of Denver lol
Here's my pic of the east and west portals (respectively) from the last time I visited in 2022: https://i.imgur.com/sH0RNyg.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/fGdzV4G.jpeg
The big black fence around the east portal didn't used to be there, and you can see the DHS surveillance gantry right over the tracks. You can't get anywhere close enough to even read the plaque/dedication embedded on the right side of the portal. Hope you have a good telephoto lens!
On the west side, the DHS cameras are back to the left out of frame of the shot, at the very eastern edge of the Winter Park station platform. The water system is also much more visible on the west side than on the east side: https://earth.google.com/web/search/Winter+Park,+CO/@39.8871...
The east side is much less important-looking because it just becomes South Boulder Creek: https://earth.google.com/web/search/Winter+Park,+CO/@39.9022...
And here's one of my favorite hobo channels taking a ride through it westbound :) https://youtu.be/xNvnHAkm5dk?t=2715 and west portal emergence with the water pipe clearly in view: https://youtu.be/xNvnHAkm5dk?t=2787
I always think about this when I watch the WKUK “It's illegal to say…” sketch, because “under the Brooklyn Bridge” is like adjacent to One Police Plaza https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQOvyGbBtY
Some of the airbases showed some fields where the actual jet bunkers are, and if you zoomed out you could see it was just a copy/paste of a field nearby. Total fakery.
They have stopped doing that since, probably because there is no point with the amount of imagery available today.
And yeah countries like China messing with their map datum is weird. And so easy to compensate that it serves no military purpose.
They have bought into mangled maps and it would be a challenge to update everything for simple lat/lon. It would be easier to get every car in China to drive on the left, for them to change their railway gauge to 7' 1/4" or to move to the Swatch Internet Time standard. Think of all the title deeds, utility maps and everything that you need surveyors for.
As for military purpose, have you ever done any work with the military? Even though every army plays a good ballistics game, they tend not to be mathematicians. I would not want it to be tested, but my hunch is the mangled maps would work extremely well, even though their foes have had decades to do their own map making.
All you need for this is to know whether the existing number corresponds to the old system or the new system and a piece of code that can convert from one to the other.
Haha no, I can't stand them and their hierarchies.
But yeah that was my point, the enemy has their own maps, with their own datums anyway.
10 months ago there was an Ask HN: No planes visible at LHR on Google Maps Satellite view. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841727
No planes at all on the ground, none at any gates, none parked outside. I gave some thoughts (corona, bank holiday) but you would expect to see at least a couple. Seems like the imagery was altered: that someone did and can do that.
edits - another explanation could be that the airport was closed so that the plane taking the photos could fly over it.
By "we" I mean my company and my product does not do that. That part holds. (or, well, more precisely, that's a different product that I don't work on and isn't marketed as "imagery")
But yes, some other mosaic products are specifically requested with planes photoshopped out of airports and all waterbodies a consistent artificial color so that sunglint can be automatically simulated in flight sims for training pilots.
Because that data is often a high quality dataset available for purchase, sometimes google/etc reuses those datasets.
Here's detailed info about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
And your other interests really coincide with mine. :)
France is particularly full of these kinds of sites, mostly having to do with their nuclear deterrent. If you want to see the interesting vertical silo storage they use for their SLBMs near the loading pier, you're best off using Yandex.
It was built more than three years ago.
Looks the same on Google and Bing. You can see it on Apple Maps though: https://maps.apple.com/place?coordinate=21.324794,-157.67986...
[1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/%22Robin+Masters+Estate%...
E.g. the same place in 2020,2021 is covered with a cloud, which never happens in a consumer-oriented maps.
On the other hand a motivated party can easily get a satellite view from Apple Maps / Google Earth or even build a 3D map using a drone (it is not a no-fly zone). So it doesn’t really contribute to VIP’s security.
(Such as adversaries without their own satellite imagery capabilities, but with access to trucks, small arms, and crude explosives.)
If Google were censoring, but Microsoft wasn't, then maybe that's an oversight. (For example, maybe MS were told/asked to, but no one noticed that MS didn't, or that MS missed that spot.)
If you wanted to alert authorities to a possible oversight, I don't know who; maybe start by calling one of your congressperson's offices, and someone there could forward the info, or suggest who to call?
You'd think that procedurally generated scenery would be preference for most governments. It raises less awareness than a blur or missing tiles.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/12/vera-rub...
This is generally the same in Korea, the title is wrong. The military bases are made to look like forests.