China’s GPS Shift and Online Maps

If the road grid in online maps of China doesn’t line up with the aerial/satellite imagery layer, Anastasia Bizyayeva explains in a Medium post earlier this year, it’s because China’s map data uses a different geodetic datum, GCJ-02, rather than WGS-84. “GCJ-02 is based on WGS-84, but with a deliberate obfuscation algorithm applied to it. The effect of this is that there are random offsets added to both latitude and longitude, ranging from as little as 50m to as much as 500m.” Chinese map companies are obliged to use GCJ-02 so their maps and imagery line up; outside China, companies can choose to use Chinese data and imagery and have alignment artifacts at the Chinese border, or use Chinese data with images aligned with WGS-84 and have the roads appear offset from the imagery. [Kottke]

Behind the Scenes of the ‘Barbie’ Map

The Wall Street Journal provides some background to the map that got the Barbie movie into trouble in Vietnam, and the steps movie studios are increasingly taken to ensure that on-screen cartography doesn’t run afoul of other countries’ sensitivities. How to avoid a repeat of the Barbie controversy? “One proposal executives have discussed: having an employee inside the clearance department review every map featured on screen for potential problems or offenses. That’s a tough proposition, one employee noted, since the ‘Barbie’ map wasn’t processed by the Los Angeles team as a normal map at all.” (Link may be paywalled; see also the Apple News+ link—which granted is also paywalled.)

Previously: Philippine Censors Want ‘Barbie’ Blurred, Not Banned; The Nine-Dash Line Gets ‘Barbie’ Banned in Vietnam.

Philippine Censors Want ‘Barbie’ Blurred, Not Banned

The Philippines is just as keen as Vietnam is to ban films showing the nine-dash line, and has done so in the past. Nevertheless, the Philippine censor board has decided to allow the release of the forthcoming Barbie movie, but has asked Warner Bros. to blur the offending map, which is apparently only eight dashes (and therefore okay) and too cartoonish to be linked to a controversial line on a real map. Coverage: BBC News, Guardian, Hollywood Reporter, Variety.

That follows the Warner Bros. line; last Thursday Variety reported the Warner Bros. response to Barbie being banned in Vietnam: “‘The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,’ a spokesperson for the Warner Bros. Film Group told Variety. ‘The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the “real world.” It was not intended to make any type of statement.’”

(Based on the screenshots I’ve seen, all it is is a dashed line extending east from a wildly inaccurate Asia; there are dashed lines elsewhere on the map that suggest routes more than borders.)

The Nine-Dash Line Strikes Again!

Netflix has removed Flight to You from its service in Vietnam, Variety reports, because the Chinese drama has scenes in nine episodes that show the nine-dash line on a map. The nine-dash line depicts China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, which Vietnam (among other countries) bitterly contests—to the point of banning depictions of said line in all media.

Previously: The Nine-Dash Line Gets ‘Barbie’ Banned in Vietnam.

The Nine-Dash Line Gets ‘Barbie’ Banned in Vietnam

The upcoming film Barbie has been banned in Vietnam, the Washington Post reports, because it apparently depicts a map showing the nine-dash line—the line that depicts China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. That line, and those claims, enclose the Paracel Islands, which Vietnam also claims as its territory. Blame Hollywood’s aversion to getting banned in the much larger Chinese market for not showing the nine-dash line, I guess; while Vietnam has a history of banning films for this reason (including, per the nine-dash line Wikipedia page, the recent films Abominable and Uncharted), it’s not remotely the only state that indulges in this sort of thing.

Google Didn’t Stop Obscuring Imagery of Russian Military Sites Because the Imagery Hadn’t Been Obscured in the First Place

Yesterday, reports that Google Maps had stopped obscuring satellite imagery of sensitive Russian military facilities spread like wildfire across Twitter. Only there was no official announcement from Google saying they’d done so, and while Ukrainian Twitter was seriously running with it, I wanted to see some confirmation from the mapping side. In the event, an update to Ars Technica’s story says that Google hadn’t stopped blurring the imagery—the imagery hadn’t been blurred in the first place. “A Google spokesperson told Ars that the company hasn’t changed anything with regard to blurring out sensitive sites in Russia, so perhaps none of us were looking closely until now.”

Apple Maps Asia-Pacific Update

Apple’s new maps have come to Australia [9to5Mac, MacRumors].

Meanwhile, the South China Morning Post reports that “iPhone and Apple Watch users in China can no longer see their geographic coordinates and elevation on the Compass app, according to Chinese media reports and user comments. However, information including bearings and general location are still available.”

And according to a report in The Information (paywall) that was summarized by John Gruber, back in 2014 or 2015 the Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping required Apple Maps to make the disputed Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands appear large even when zoomed out, and made the Apple Watch’s Chinese release contingent on that request—to which Apple acquiesced.

Google Removing Uluru Street View Images

Google has agreed to Parks Australia’s request that user photos taken from the summit of Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock) be removed from Street View; climbing Uluru, which is owned by and sacred to the Pitjantjatjara people, has been prohibited since 2019. ABC Australia, CNN. As of this writing a couple of images are still visible. Aerial coverage is unaffected. [Boing Boing]

Blank Map Tiles Point to Locations of Xinjiang Detention Centres

As part of their investigation into China’s practice of detaining Uighur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, Buzzfeed News journalists compared blanked-out areas in Baidu Maps with uncensored imagery from Google Earth and satellite data providers, and, after sorting through some 50,000 possible locations using custom web tools, built a database of some “428 locations in Xinjiang bearing the hallmarks of prisons and detention centers.” This article explains the methodology.

Blurring or removing map data to prevent people from seeing something important or sensitive is a pretty loud signal that there’s something important or sensitive to see there. Some five million Baidu Maps tiles were masked in Xinjiang alone—there’s a lot the Chinese government considers sensitive—which made the unmasking considerably harder. But not impossible.

Censorship and the Ordnance Survey

A blog post from the National Library of Wales explores how sensitive military and industrial sites were omitted from the published versions of Ordnance Survey maps.

The removal of military installations from OS maps was at its height in the 19th century and the World Wars, but throughout the Cold War and beyond, many sensitive sites were left off the maps entirely. It took the public availability of high-resolution satellite imagery at the turn of the 21st century to render this type of censorship largely ineffective, although labels are still omitted in some cases.

The Ordnance Survey did survey and map sensitive sites, but those maps were military-only. The differences between these military maps and the public maps make for a number of interesting comparisons: see the post for examples.

Shetland Unboxed

Wikimedia Commons

I hadn’t realized that Tavish Scott’s amendment preventing Scottish maps from displaying Shetland in an inset map actually passed. Section 17 of the Scottish Parliament’s Islands (Scotland) Act 2018 requires maps of Scotland produced by Scottish public institutions to display Shetland “in a manner that accurately and proportionately represents their geographical location in relation to the rest of Scotland.” The Act passed the Scottish Parliament last May and received Royal Assent in July. Now that the provision in question has come into force, the media, which always likes a weird map story, is seized of the issue all over again: there were news stories last week from BBC News, CBC Radio’s As It Happens, and NPR.

Basically, Shetlanders are delighted and cartographers are horrified: maps of Scotland will perforce be less detailed to accomodate all the empty ocean. In practice I suspect little will change: a loophole in paragraph 17(2)(b) enables a public authority to sidestep the requirement if they can justify it. I imagine that justification will be coming up a lot in maps that people actually use, leaving only illustrative and symbolic maps affected by the law. And, of course, private mapmakers and mapmakers not under the purview of the Scottish government (which I imagine includes the Ordnance Survey) will not be affected by this law.

Meanwhile, Maps Mania’s Keir Clarke gives us Unboxing the Shetlands, a tool to place mainland Scotland in an inset map instead.

Previously: In Praise of Inset Maps; Bruce Gittings on the Shetland Controversy; Don’t Put Shetland in a Box.

In Praise of Inset Maps

The kerfuffle about Shetland being relegated to inset maps (Ed Parsons has taken to calling this “Insetgate”) is not quite done. Kenneth Field shares his thoughts in a post titled “In Praise of Insets,” in which he calls Scottish politician Tavish Scott’s proposal to ban the use of inset maps to portray Shetland as “utter nonsense” and goes on to defend their use more generally.

Insets are not just used to move geographically awkward places. They are commonly used to create larger scale versions of the map for smaller, yet more densely populated places. Often they are positioned over sparsely populated land to use space wisely. I’m guessing Scott would have an objection to an inset that, to his mind, would exaggerate the geographical importance of Glasgow compared to Shetland. Yet … in population terms it’s a place of massively greater importance so one could argue it deserves greater relative visual prominence on the map. Many maps are about people, not geography.

Previously: Don’t Put Shetland in a BoxBruce Gittings on the Shetland Controversy.

Bruce Gittings on the Shetland Controversy

Writing on the Royal Scottish Geographic Society’s blog, Bruce Gittings challenges the notion that putting Shetland in an inset box is a map error:

It is plainly not: it is a cartographic compromise. And there are always implications to a compromise. To include the Northern Isles in their actual geographical location, separated from the mainland by almost 100 miles of water, would reduce the scale at which the country can be displayed by around 40%.

That means Scotland’s smaller Council Areas (e.g. Dundee) effectively disappear, reduced from any kind of area to an insignificant point, or major features such as the Firths of Tay and Forth lost under text-labels for Dundee and Edinburgh. We are left having to put the Central Belt in a zoom-box because of the loss of detail in areas where most people live, or having to use two sheets of paper rather than one for maps of Scotland. […]

The circumstance of Shetland-in-a-box (and indeed Orkney-in-a-box-too) is a feature of maps intended to display our entire country with a reasonable level of detail.

Previously: Don’t Put Shetland in a Box.

Don’t Put Shetland in a Box

Wikimedia Commons

Shetland’s representative to the Scottish Parliament has moved an amendment to proposed legislation that would require public authorities to portray Shetland “accurately and proportionately” in Scottish maps: BBC News, iNewsThe Scotsman. Because Shetland is so far to the northeast of the island of Great Britain, it’s usually shown in an inset map; this move would, it seems, prohibit this, and presumably require Scottish maps to show vast tracts of ocean (as above). [NLS Maps]

China Restricts Foreign Firms from Mapping Roads for Self-Driving Cars

Self-driving cars require insanely detailed maps in order to function. But, as The Drive’s Stephen Edelstein writes, “The Chinese government is blocking foreign companies from mapping its roads in great detail, according to a Financial Times report. The restrictions, which reportedly do not apply to Chinese firms, are being instituted in the name of national security. China is concerned about spying.” Mapping, geotagging, geographic surveys—all of these have been subject to Chinese government restrictions for many years (recall the trouble Google Maps has had operating in China), so this is more of an additional data point than an actual surprise. [Boing Boing/PC Mag]

Previously: The Business of Making Maps for Self-Driving Cars.