Google, the ultimate cartographer
March 10, 2018 9:59 PM Subscribe
Google Maps is Different in Different Countries - especially when it comes to disputed territories.
I suppose the real side google is taking in those situations is: which map do they show from within the territory itself?
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:44 PM on March 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:44 PM on March 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
So they are already free to basically ignore UN resolutions.... And if they're going to be more powerful than nation states and organized groups of nation states, when do they start handing out google citizenships?
posted by DreamerFi at 11:45 PM on March 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by DreamerFi at 11:45 PM on March 10, 2018 [2 favorites]
The “serve different pages” thing is cowardly at best, if not outright evil. A map is assumed to present the truth. If territory is disputed, it is disputed, and that is the truth even in the countries doing the disputing. To present the territory as definitively one or the other is a lie. Lying to both sides is telling two lies. An ostensibly factual resource ought not to do that.
As a citizen and resident of a country involved in a massively high-stakes territorial dispute (STAY OFF OUR TINY USELESS UNINHABITABLE BARREN LUMP OF FROZEN ROCK, YOU THIEVING DANISH BASTARDS! THOSE NESTING SEAGULLS ARE CANADIAN CITIZENS!), it’s interesting to look at it and see that Google hasn’t even bothered to draw the border in at all. I’d attribute that to its being a maritime border, except that our other watery borders (US and France) are clearly marked and visible even when zoomed all the way out. Interesting. Maybe *all* of Greenland belongs to Canada now? Is that how this works?
posted by Sys Rq at 11:51 PM on March 10, 2018 [9 favorites]
As a citizen and resident of a country involved in a massively high-stakes territorial dispute (STAY OFF OUR TINY USELESS UNINHABITABLE BARREN LUMP OF FROZEN ROCK, YOU THIEVING DANISH BASTARDS! THOSE NESTING SEAGULLS ARE CANADIAN CITIZENS!), it’s interesting to look at it and see that Google hasn’t even bothered to draw the border in at all. I’d attribute that to its being a maritime border, except that our other watery borders (US and France) are clearly marked and visible even when zoomed all the way out. Interesting. Maybe *all* of Greenland belongs to Canada now? Is that how this works?
posted by Sys Rq at 11:51 PM on March 10, 2018 [9 favorites]
Canada's dispute with Denmark over Hans Island is just an excuse for the two countries to give each other booze.
posted by dazed_one at 12:04 AM on March 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by dazed_one at 12:04 AM on March 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
An interesting fallout of the dispute on Arunachal Pradesh is that the Chinese maps don’t show _any_ towns at all. They simply don’t have Chinese names for Itanagar, Niharalgun, Tawang etc, and so the entire state with its 1.3 million people as barren uninhabited land.
The Chinese position on this region, and Spratly Islands in SE Asia, is simply crazy. The premise was that the monastery at Tawang (in West AP) once sent tributes to Lhasa and therefore, the _entire_ state, with its complex mix of 26-odd tribes speak in mutually unintelligible languages should be part of China. Wonder why they don’t ask the people in the first place whether they want to be Chinese or not. Culturally, they clearly aren’t.
posted by the cydonian at 12:06 AM on March 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
The Chinese position on this region, and Spratly Islands in SE Asia, is simply crazy. The premise was that the monastery at Tawang (in West AP) once sent tributes to Lhasa and therefore, the _entire_ state, with its complex mix of 26-odd tribes speak in mutually unintelligible languages should be part of China. Wonder why they don’t ask the people in the first place whether they want to be Chinese or not. Culturally, they clearly aren’t.
posted by the cydonian at 12:06 AM on March 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
The best part of this is we have been trained by giant companies that there simply is no recourse at all if they make an arbitrary decision and it's incorrect...sorry, there's nothing we can do! Assuming you can get anyone to answer your plea at all.
Data about the world should be open-source, period.
posted by maxwelton at 12:23 AM on March 11, 2018 [8 favorites]
Data about the world should be open-source, period.
posted by maxwelton at 12:23 AM on March 11, 2018 [8 favorites]
A map is assumed to present the truth. ... An ostensibly factual resource ought not to do that.
The factual bits of the map, like a lake or a mountain, should indeed be factual, but the bullshit bits of the map might as well show different bullshit to different bullshitters.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 12:38 AM on March 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
The factual bits of the map, like a lake or a mountain, should indeed be factual, but the bullshit bits of the map might as well show different bullshit to different bullshitters.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 12:38 AM on March 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
it’s interesting to look at it and see that Google hasn’t even bothered to draw the border in at all.
On OpenStreetMap the borders are visible and go around the island, making it look like it's its own thing. That's one way of avoiding the problem, especially in an open-source project that can be edited by anyone...
posted by Vesihiisi at 1:25 AM on March 11, 2018
On OpenStreetMap the borders are visible and go around the island, making it look like it's its own thing. That's one way of avoiding the problem, especially in an open-source project that can be edited by anyone...
posted by Vesihiisi at 1:25 AM on March 11, 2018
Related: Raymond Chen, on his blog The Old New Thing, answers the question "Why isn’t my time zone highlighted on the world map?"
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 4:06 AM on March 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 4:06 AM on March 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
The factual bits of the map, like a lake or a mountain, should indeed be factual, but the bullshit bits of the map might as well show different bullshit to different bullshitters.
Okay, but then why also show the bullshit to the three billion Chinese and Indian people who aren’t politicians? When you do that, you become a major part of the propaganda machine.
posted by Sys Rq at 4:20 AM on March 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
Okay, but then why also show the bullshit to the three billion Chinese and Indian people who aren’t politicians? When you do that, you become a major part of the propaganda machine.
posted by Sys Rq at 4:20 AM on March 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
Data about the world should be open-source, period.
Number of editors in [large population country] editing ownership borders of [lesser population country], shift ownership to themselves. Who needs armies?
I mean, it works as well as a rubber chicken armed army.
posted by filtergik at 5:04 AM on March 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Number of editors in [large population country] editing ownership borders of [lesser population country], shift ownership to themselves. Who needs armies?
I mean, it works as well as a rubber chicken armed army.
posted by filtergik at 5:04 AM on March 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
The United Nations can't prevent your software or service from being sold in e.g. India, but the Indian government can. So you end up accommodating the laws in India or the demands of the Indian government. So it's not that Google is more powerful than nation states, it's actually quite the other way around.
Google may well be more powerful than the United Nations but that's not much of a stretch :/.
posted by Slothrup at 7:37 AM on March 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
Google may well be more powerful than the United Nations but that's not much of a stretch :/.
posted by Slothrup at 7:37 AM on March 11, 2018 [6 favorites]
All maps are political because all maps are inherently reductive, some are just more reductive or more political than others.
Google is an ad company. They don't give a fuck about any sort of objective truth. They want to serve ads to (and collect data on) the populations of the two countries that contain over a third of the world population, and they really don't care what they have to do to make that happen.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:40 AM on March 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Google is an ad company. They don't give a fuck about any sort of objective truth. They want to serve ads to (and collect data on) the populations of the two countries that contain over a third of the world population, and they really don't care what they have to do to make that happen.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:40 AM on March 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
This is another of the weird consequences you get when an international service is also trying to comply with local laws. Honestly, while the “serve different results in different countries” stance disturbs me, I’m not sure alternative is better. If Google were to take a single stand on these lines, what stand would that be — a US view? Google’s own best guess — and are they really qualified to make that? And in either case, basically just tell the local governments they have chosen to break the law for their own reasons.
See also, serving different search results or blocking different Twitter accounts in different parts of the world. International services get very weird.
posted by fencerjimmy at 10:12 AM on March 11, 2018 [8 favorites]
See also, serving different search results or blocking different Twitter accounts in different parts of the world. International services get very weird.
posted by fencerjimmy at 10:12 AM on March 11, 2018 [8 favorites]
For just a taste of some of these disputes, I present OpenStreetMap's Cyprus project.
I did have to laugh at the video's statement that Google's Mapmaker was “strictly moderated”. It was shut down for a few years after colossal vandalism, and in my neighbourhood at least, Google still carries a patina of messed-up edits and wholesale lifts from OSM.
posted by scruss at 12:31 PM on March 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
I did have to laugh at the video's statement that Google's Mapmaker was “strictly moderated”. It was shut down for a few years after colossal vandalism, and in my neighbourhood at least, Google still carries a patina of messed-up edits and wholesale lifts from OSM.
posted by scruss at 12:31 PM on March 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
On the one hand I sympathize with people who argue that Google should tell the truth, and from a philosophic standpoint I don't think it's really that difficult: show disputed territory as disputed. That's factually correct at least.
But legally, yeah. I can't sympathize too much with the Google should tell the truth argument when telling the truth would mean criminal charges.
Mostly I'm kind of surprised at India. I'd thought the Indian government was better on free speech/press issues than to criminalize publishing a map acknowledging territorial disputes.
posted by sotonohito at 5:33 PM on March 11, 2018
But legally, yeah. I can't sympathize too much with the Google should tell the truth argument when telling the truth would mean criminal charges.
Mostly I'm kind of surprised at India. I'd thought the Indian government was better on free speech/press issues than to criminalize publishing a map acknowledging territorial disputes.
posted by sotonohito at 5:33 PM on March 11, 2018
I did have to laugh at the video's statement that Google's Mapmaker was “strictly moderated”.
Some years ago I lodged a complaint about an antisemitic name that some troll had given to a local public school's play area. The response was basically "prove that that's not what it's called".
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:58 PM on March 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
Some years ago I lodged a complaint about an antisemitic name that some troll had given to a local public school's play area. The response was basically "prove that that's not what it's called".
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:58 PM on March 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
Joe in Australia, that sort of thing is pretty much why I gave up on editing Wikipedia.
posted by traveler_ at 7:53 PM on March 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by traveler_ at 7:53 PM on March 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
Data about the world should be open-source, period.
Get with the times. The current technological panacea is the Blockchain. The Blockchain will solve all our border disputes.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 9:52 PM on March 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
Get with the times. The current technological panacea is the Blockchain. The Blockchain will solve all our border disputes.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 9:52 PM on March 11, 2018 [3 favorites]
we have been trained by giant companies that there simply is no recourse at all if they make an arbitrary decision and it's incorrect...sorry, there's nothing we can do!
Australia has something called the National Broadband Network.
As a result of our current conservative Government's natural desire to nobble and hamstring any project dreamed up by a previous Labor Government, the houses in and around my rural village get their broadband not via fibre as originally envisioned, but via a Fixed Wireless service based on roof-mounted antenna units that link to dedicated 4G towers. And because my local region is quite hilly, there are lots of odd little coverage patches around the edges of our local tower's service footprint.
Some friends of mine live in a house that's smack in the middle of one of those little patches. But they're on a large rural block, and the spot where their driveway meets the road is outside the coverage area. And that spot is where Google Maps chose to drop the locator pin when I used it to look up their address. And Google Maps appears to be the source of address data used by nbnCo's coverage map. And the whole eligibility process is automated and no person inside nbnCo appears to have the power to override individual search results. So their address got deemed ineligible for a Fixed Wireless NBN service despite being inside a coverage patch, and they ended up with a shitty satellite connection instead.
After banging my head unsucessfully against the NBN bureaucracy on their behalf for some weeks, it occurred to me that I'd once stumbled across a Google Maps facility that lets you submit requests for corrections to the address lookup database. I submitted one for their address, specifying the coordinates of the north end of their house (which had the best line of sight to the tower) - and to my complete astonishment, got email confirmation two weeks later that the entry for their address had in fact been altered!
Was totally not expecting that to work. But it did, and searching for their address on Google Maps now drops the locator pin on their house instead of their driveway gate, and the end result is that nbnCo now does classify their house as eligible for Fixed Wireless coverage.
Sometimes you can win one!
For a while.
Because as it turns out, an nbnCo contractor having now visited their place and done a signal strength test, that the patch of coverage shown for them on the map is pretty much illusory. But hey, we tried.
posted by flabdablet at 2:31 AM on March 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
Australia has something called the National Broadband Network.
As a result of our current conservative Government's natural desire to nobble and hamstring any project dreamed up by a previous Labor Government, the houses in and around my rural village get their broadband not via fibre as originally envisioned, but via a Fixed Wireless service based on roof-mounted antenna units that link to dedicated 4G towers. And because my local region is quite hilly, there are lots of odd little coverage patches around the edges of our local tower's service footprint.
Some friends of mine live in a house that's smack in the middle of one of those little patches. But they're on a large rural block, and the spot where their driveway meets the road is outside the coverage area. And that spot is where Google Maps chose to drop the locator pin when I used it to look up their address. And Google Maps appears to be the source of address data used by nbnCo's coverage map. And the whole eligibility process is automated and no person inside nbnCo appears to have the power to override individual search results. So their address got deemed ineligible for a Fixed Wireless NBN service despite being inside a coverage patch, and they ended up with a shitty satellite connection instead.
After banging my head unsucessfully against the NBN bureaucracy on their behalf for some weeks, it occurred to me that I'd once stumbled across a Google Maps facility that lets you submit requests for corrections to the address lookup database. I submitted one for their address, specifying the coordinates of the north end of their house (which had the best line of sight to the tower) - and to my complete astonishment, got email confirmation two weeks later that the entry for their address had in fact been altered!
Was totally not expecting that to work. But it did, and searching for their address on Google Maps now drops the locator pin on their house instead of their driveway gate, and the end result is that nbnCo now does classify their house as eligible for Fixed Wireless coverage.
Sometimes you can win one!
For a while.
Because as it turns out, an nbnCo contractor having now visited their place and done a signal strength test, that the patch of coverage shown for them on the map is pretty much illusory. But hey, we tried.
posted by flabdablet at 2:31 AM on March 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
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All this reminds me of the "falsehoods programmers believe about ..." lists you see occasionally, like the one for time or names. There doesn't seem to be a good one for geography, or at least one that includes things like disputed territories. And Google's "serve different pages" idea is a disgusting hack: not only is it error-prone (as their own experiences demonstrate) but it actually destroys the whole point of having a map.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:55 PM on March 10, 2018 [8 favorites]