Is Google Maps Google’s Achilles Heel?
It makes little doubt today that Google is the most universalist company of the twenty-first century:
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.(From Google Corporate Site)
Google-owned Blogger just celebrated its 10 years anniversary, and focused their communications on the 300 millions blogs created. As of today, Google can translate 50+ different languages into your own. On Youtube, if you submit captions with your video, then foreign viewers can watch your video in 50+ languages instantly. Google is literally cracking open the Tower of Babel dilemma, by offering a technology that offers one universal language. Is Google better than Jesus?
Maybe not so. Google has one huge problem: its Maps! Maps is Google’s most beautiful product, but it is also the most problematic, because it pushes the search company to get into the muddy waters of geopolitics.
Recently, Switzerland asked Google to take away Streetview from Switzerland’s Google Maps. The neutral central-European country explains that despite Google’s responsiveness for Streetview’s users’ complaints, the privacy of its citizens is too much at stakes.
You can get more details about this news in this Information Week article. To emphasize on Google’s problems with Streetview in general, writer Thomas Claburn provides other examples where Google Maps’ technology failed when applied in different cultures. For example:
Street View has also met resistance in Japan. Google was asked to re-shoot Street View images in twelve Japanese cities using cameras positioned lower to the ground, to avoid photographing over the fences protecting people’s yards.
Wow, couldn’t they figure that out before shooting every street corners of Japan?
Tags: geopolitic, google, google maps, streetview, universalist
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August 26th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
The above examples for Switzerland and Japan are not really issues of geopolitics. They are matters of privacy. As such they are simply further examples of a global company having to deal with local laws and concerns (Google’s insistence on publishing copyrighted books, would be another).
Google Maps does swim in the shark-infested shoals of geo-politics, but it is in the form of things like national boundaries and names. For example, how should Tibet be shown? What about the various claims on Macedonia? Or even less known boundary disputes such as Guyana and Venezuela? A recent example was the use of the use of Chinese names for a number of Indian places near the Indo-Chinese border.
August 28th, 2009 at 12:06 am
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