Skip to main content

Google Maps - Political Wars

"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility"
    Remember these words from Uncle Ben to Peter Pan? Such is the case with Google Maps. Being one of the world’s leading online web mapping service means also trying to walk the impossible tightrope between the political bickering of countries. On several occasions, Google has found itself at the receiving end of the anomalies involving the geopolitical delineations and labels shown in Google Maps and Google Earth. Google's representation of the country borders and labels, and the interpretation of the same has caused many a political argument still date.

    Google has now raised the ire of Iranians over its refusal to label the waters between Iran and the Arab Gulf states on Google Maps. Iranians call this gulf the Persian Gulf while Arabs have named it the Arabian Gulf. The government of Iran is now threatening to escalate the situation through a litigation against Google for removing the label. Typing in a search on Google Maps for the Persian Gulf takes the searcher to the correct geographic location but the body of water is unlabeled.  However, a search within Google Earth shows the same location retains both the Persian Gulf and Arabian Gulf labels.



    Just recently, I had read an article, where based on a 3,000m difference in the demarcation of the boundary line between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, a Nicaraguan military commander moved his troops into Costa Rica and set up camp.  Eden Pastora, the commander, used the Google maps satellite view as a justification for taking down a Costa Rican flag and doing clean up work along the river. The boundary between the two countries in that area differs significantly on Google Maps compared to Bing Maps and Yahoo! Maps. While many sites on the Internet are buzzing with this Google Map “error”, the reality of where to border should be isn’t so clear.


    Not going far off, up close at home, we have a disputed border with China at the state of Arunachal Pradesh which is shown differently based on the country from where the user has made the request. For an user logged in from India, the Arunachal State appears to be a part of India, for a user logged in from China, that area appears to be a part of China and for other users the State border is shown as a dotted line. In the article "Is Google Cheating?" I had written about the issue and also described the reasons that Google has for doing so.

    Today, in a world where there already are so many things that may cause wars among different countries, technology like Google Maps could also lead to a political war! Is this what was meant to happen? I don't think it was. People have started using small loop holes in huge technologies to their benefits leading to dire situations which might lead to Technology giants, governments taking drastic measures.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments here...

Recommended for You

Where does Google get it's live traffic data from?

Referring to a post that I wrote earlier, Google’s - Live traffic Layer , ever wondered how Google collected this data? I was wondering the other day, how Google received live data to display it on their maps as a layer! I looked up the web and found something very interesting and am sharing the same with you all. As we all know, the traffic layer is available most accurately in several states in USA. Most major metro areas in the US have sensors embedded in their highways. These sensors track real time traffic data. Easy to miss at high speeds (hopefully anyway, traffic permitting), more commonly noticed may be the similar sensors that often exist at many busy intersections that help the traffic lights most efficiently let the most amount of people through. The information from these tracking sensors is reported back to the Department of Transportation (DOT). The DOT uses this data to update some of the digital signs that report traffic conditions in many metro areas. They als...
17 comments
Read more

Jquery Mobile Listview enhancements and customization

    In this post today, we will take a look at the various enhancements and customization that we can do to the standard listviews. All these enhancements or customization are questions asked by various people on the Jquery Mobile forum. I have tried to put together a solution to some of them.     Let's take a look at a few of them. Some questions are really amazing like " W hen i have 3 nested listview structure and moved to 3rd nested, how to move back to second nested listview? " Now this is a really good question and a nice valid requirement too. When we had see an example on nested listviews  you must have wondered how we would navigate to the previous levels from the current level. Well here is a solution that I had put together.     Another really nice question was " Listview with collapsable listview inside ". This is really a good example to try out. Take a look at the solution that was proposed and also taken from other jsfid...
Post a Comment
Read more

SASS: Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets - An Introduction

    I had some free time today, and decided to explore into SASS, which I had planned on doing for a long time. SASS is really cool and it really is simple styling with a lot of attitude. SASS really makes CSS so much fun. I loved it and am putting up a few posts to talk about the various features of SASS.     SASS is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance and much more. The SASS CSS is required to be compiled before it is transformed into standard CSS using a command line tool or a web-framework plugin. Let's not worry about this for now.     SASS CSS can be written using 2 types of syntaxes. The most popularly used syntax is known as "SCSS", rightly named " Sassy CSS" and is a superset of CSS3's syntax. This means that every CSS3 stylesheet is valid SCSS as well. The second syntax is an older one known as the "indented syntax" or just SASS. This syntax is for people who do not love brackets and...
Post a Comment
Read more

Multiple markers...

            It rarely happens that there is just one point of interest or just one location that you would like to mark! Generally there is a bunch of markers that appear on the map! Specifically, you want a list of latitude and longitude pairs representing the points of the markers you'll plot.             To store the list of points, you can combine the power of Javascript's array and object constructs. An array stores a list of numbered entities. To access the elements of the array, you must use their numeric indices. So array[0] will point to the first element in the array while array[n] will point to the nth element in the array.             I will use the following piece of Javascript code to demonstrate how multiple markers can be made to appear on a map using the array structure and the for loop for iteration....
1 comment
Read more

Two maps on the same page - Side-by-side

    How good I am feeling to post a code example after such a long time! It's been all "news" over the past so many posts! Well now that I am finally doing a code example, I am posting a very highly requested code sample. Placing two Google Maps on the same page (Now that's simple you would say!), but side by side. Now this is the thing that most people struggle with. Well, implementing the second part is also very simple, as you will see in today's code.     Let's see the code. Here it is!     The output of the above code will be as seen in the result section above.     As most of you will realize, there are two maps, one centered at "Pune" and other at "Noida". Why I chose these two locations? Well, just like that!...The main issue of concern is how the maps appeared side-by-side and not one below the other as would be normal behavior of two "div" elements used in the same page. Now here is the trick! Check out the...
10 comments
Read more