All Maps in China are Transformed

There's a couple of regulations for selling GPS enabled devices in China (I am a software guy on a major PND manufacturer with products being sold in China).<p>- The map data is scrambled (GPS coordinates are encrypted). - To correlate a GPS position with the map data, you plug the HW position through an encryption library (which you have to compile in a specific government building in Beijing). - Border drawing is strongly regulated: no border line between Mainland China and Taiwan, Tibet is of course China, South East Asia Islands can't have border lines drawn and Kashmir is a big thing also with border lines. - You can't show pure GPS coordinates - You can't include a number or POIs in your map (mostly government buildings/facilities).<p>As a note, India as a certain degree of insanity as well: You can't export a map. Launching a PND there involved shipping a bunch of map technicians there to actually make sure we never got a map outside of India...<p>Cheers, R

Back in the early 90's (in the US) I had a friend who was a college student from China. In the common area of her dorm there was a huge wall-size Rand-McNally map of the world. We were looking it over.<p>"There's China" I said. "And there's Taiwan."<p>"You know Taiwan is really not that big." she said.<p>"What do you mean?"<p>"Map makers show it larger than it really is in order to exaggerate its importance."<p>I was a little weirded out by that idea. This girl was pretty intelligent, she seemed to know some math and logical thinking. She was in the process of becoming a CPA.<p>For better or worse I responded with practical analysis: "How would that even work? You and I could go buy maps right now for navigating ships and airplanes, those would have to be accurate in order to function. We could compare them to this one and if they are noticeably different we could complain and the company that made the map would lose face. Why would Rand-McNally give a shit about the political importance of Taiwan anyway, enough to risk their own credibility?"<p>"They just do. All map makers do this." She would not be convinced.

It seems like there is little tactical payoff in doing this, as large, <i>foreign</i> militaries would already have detailed, accurate maps covering the whole world, China included. I bet this is an internal-resistance oriented policy.

There are several tools that allow you to compare OpenStreetMap and Google Maps by overlaying partially on the other. Here's one of the area in question:<p><a href="http://sautter.com/map/?zoom=15&#38;lat=31.21741&#38;lon=121.4504&#38;layers=B000000TFFFFFTFF" rel="nofollow">http://sautter.com/map/?zoom=15&#38;lat=31.21741&#38;lon=121...</a><p>You can see the noticable difference in street geometry.

How is this news? I work in the digital mapping world and there everybody knows this. You cannot even get the data out of China, all data has to stay within China and if you want to do map business in China, you can only do it through a joint-venture with a Chinese company.<p>[edit] BTW: India is similar, they are not scrambling the map, but it cannot leave the country either. So as a map-maker you have to have a local company there in order to do business.

Historically maps have been closely guarded military secrets. As late as the Renaissance possession of the wrong map could get you executed by European powers, even in peacetime. Rudyard Kipling's novel <i>Kim</i> is largely based on the true story of British surveying and map making in India and central Asia.

It isn't surprising at all.Soviet Union maps were also intentionally inaccurate. This inaccuracy still often appears in xUSSR maps.

Is OpenStreetMaps blocked in China? If not, there could be huge precedence to subvert this.

Both Google Maps and Nokia OVI work perfectly fine on my E71 here in China. I guess they just get that encryption library linked inside so the position of my locations always match the roads and buildings on the map. On the other hand, the satellite images in Google Maps do have an offset, which means Google has not redraw the satellite images. Either because Google is unwilling to do that, or, as machinagod said, they cannot take the encryption library back to their image server to do the recalculation.

Useful information. That explains why I was having so much trouble navigating with mapping software on my Android phone when I visited. Now, I wonder if there's a workaround.

Could it be true also for the some parts of Europe ? When i was in Belgium ( Brugge ) and Germany ( Nürnberg, Berlin ) i used google maps a lot. And i realised some streets, not all, looks longer or shorter than others on the map.

Here's a completely anecdotal, "a friend of a friend.." story, but I think it's a cool yi and you'll enjoy it:<p>A friend of a friend is a cartographer who works in DC. According to this person, the official subway map of DC distorts the true geography of the city -- and the subway lines -- as much for security purposes as it does graphic design purposes. The red line, in particular, apparently is drawn with a completely bogus path through the city on the maps. The true path of the line goes underneath the national mall and several important government buildings, if this person is to be believed.

This reminds me of the Peters Projection, one of the weirder attempts to map the oblate spheroid nature of the earth to a 2D plane.<p><a href="http://www.petersmap.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.petersmap.com/</a>

How maps look like depend on a whole bunch of other factors like the projection they use etc. Thus simply overlaying the maps and say, hey, this is distorted, is simply unfounded. It's very likely that Google maps etc may be adopting different projection systems so the users can have smooth using experience zooming in and out, and panning across the global without feeling the earth is round.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection</a>

of course it is china only. in china licensed gps maker can buy a chip deal with the offset ,provided by government.<p>it is a non uniformed transformation.being applied to.whole map , to lower the accruacy.

First - that post is 3 years old.<p>Secondly - I lived in Beijing for half a year in 2010 (ie. 2 years <i>after</i> this post was published). I used Google Maps often on my smartphone, and the GPS fix on the features map was incorrect (ie. I would be standing at a street corner and it would show me a few hundred meters down the street on the map).

i don't think it's unique to China<p>take a look at this POI on 4sq: <a href="http://4sq.com/rArZMj" rel="nofollow">http://4sq.com/rArZMj</a><p>It starts with a street view. If you zoom in a little, turns out the bar is out in the water! When you switch to Satellite view, the bar is where it is supposed to be, on the shore.

I've been in Beijing for the past 3 months, and I've been relying solely on Google Maps to get around. I never had one single problem. If there ever was any discrepancy between maps and the real world, I didn't see it.<p>I don't doubt there are issues, but in Beijing I haven't seen them.

I did see exactly the same thing in Toronto for some time. The satellite image was misaligned with the street map for the Jane/Finch area. It's fixed now.<p>I do wonder how much trouble Google goes to fix up maps in China. I can't really see enough of the map to tell if this appears to be deliberate distortion, or just another error.<p>Hopefully Google is still keeping their maps up-to-date... When I was in Beijing, I found the Google map much easier for finding bus routes that the local alternative.

It could simply be a map projection issue - where the traffic data projection is slightly off by an order of 1000 meters. This datum shift could be easily fixed by Google.

This is so ridiculous. China really thinks US Army is using Google maps? I wonder how they did not figured out that all armies are not working like theirs...

This really made me pine for the following feature Google will have in five years: "It looks like this was written in English by a non-native speaker. Would you like us to make this more grammatical? (Yes) (No)"

The Yahoo Maps for China don't look very transformed.<p><a href="http://maps.yahoo.com/#lat=39.8908713496569&#38;lon=116.4246940612793&#38;zoom=15&#38;mvt=h&#38;trf=1" rel="nofollow">http://maps.yahoo.com/#lat=39.8908713496569&#38;lon=116.4246...</a><p>(This isn't a vote for Yahoo Maps, just an observation)

This is not a problem with using a GPS, the problem is the shift from using different mapping technologies.<p>Trying to get satellite and the map portions to line up is very difficult. Trying to do it on a global scale with data from multiple sources... you get the idea.<p>Now please get back to China bashing and don't let the facts get in the way of your political/religious feelings. Remember to include lots anecdotal evidence and use the word red. And as always bring up other countries that seem scary on fox news.