Pacific Epoch reports:

Online map services offered by Sohu’s (Nasdaq: SOHU) search engine Sogou (map.sogou.com) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) China (ditu.google.cn) reveal confidential Chinese geography, reports People’s Daily. The report said eight Chinese ministries including the Ministry of Industry and Information (MII), Ministry of Foreign Affairs, State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, and Ministry of Public Safety will be investigating online mapping services from April through the end of the year. Previous reports quoted State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping deputy director Min Yiren as saying there were almost 10,000 illegal map websites in China, and that offending websites would be punished or shut down. This is the first time since the original online map regulation announcement that specific companies have been mentioned as offenders by official news outlets.

There was an apparent spotting of one of China’s new nuclear submarines on Google Earth in July of 2007. Why it took the Chinese government so long to follow up on this amazes me. Sogou started its online mapping in 2005.

China is not the only nation uncomfortable with the many potential uses of high resolution images married to a map. The Indian and American governments (most volubly amongst many) have both complained to Google and had to be mollified with vigorous blurring.

Plenty of ordinary folks with anything to hide at streetview level complained too, but it seems that privacy is only important to Google from space and when it involves regulatory bodies (of an organizational kind).

From Pacific Epoch’s note, it seems that the investigations are limited to China-registered content providers, so there’s no word whether or not this will affect Google Earth. I’m sure it’s somewhere on the to-do list.

When it does come up, Google Earth servers stream data to the client application via HTTP. The source IP address is 209.85.139.91. This could be a job for the GFW.

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