[Geowanking] China policy on Mapping Data

[Jeremy Irish]

Don't they have a separate Google web site for China? The Google.com site doesn't censor the data - China merely blocks access to Google.com but allows the Chinese version to work within the mainland. I don't know if Google Earth is blocked in China but it's certainly possible.

>From experience with geocachers traveling to other countries it can be a problem with carrying and marking locations at the physical location - not necessarily when it comes to satellite imagery. You can get arrested in many countries for marking coordinates around sensitive locations. You will get harrassed by police here and arrested if you mark coordinates around military bases, for example.

Anyone see the Federal Cave Protection act? I'm not very good at interpreting the law but it seems like there is information censorship in the US as well.
http://www.karst.org/fedlaw.htm

Jeremy

-----Original Message-----
From: geowanking-bounces at lists.burri.to [mailto:geowanking-bounces at lists.burri.to] On Behalf Of David Price
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2007 6:15 PM
To: geowanking at lists.burri.to
Subject: Re: [Geowanking] China policy on Mapping Data

Bill Kearney wrote:
> Quick, everyone go grab snapshots of google earth's pictures of all 
> their nuclear, military and other "secure" locations.  Don't forget 
> water reservoirs, oil refineries and transportation centers.

I think that raises an interesting question: even if other countries wouldn't enforce the law, will Google remove the data from Google Earth in order to keep playing nice with the Chinese government?  They already censor search results, so I would think that censoring geographic data would be a natural extension of that.  I have no idea what they'll do, but I'd be willing to bet that they won't tell anybody about the changes if they do happen.

regards,
-dp-
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