Hello Everyone.
This is my first contribution to make this platform better. Hoping not to repeat a topic, here goes:
As I was looking into the map of my region, I realized that the ocultation of sensitive places like military bases, is not working.
I have allready made a complaint to the service provider, on Google Product Feedback in the same page as the map I identified, but I dont know if this will be adequatelly answered to, so, I’m asking the comune on how to go forward and make the map database safer.
Locations aren’t automatically obscured and to my knowledge never have been. Can you describe a bit more what you expect to see, and what you see instead?
Yes… I’ll use EARTH (gogle earth) as the image suplier.
Now that I’m looking I actually can’t find the masked example I thought I had seen previouslly…
But it’s the same as this example picture I anex below, for another military instalation.
What “occultation of sensitive places like military bases”?
There are a great many parts of the world where such obscuration of imagery simply does not occur. For example in the UK the Cheltenham headquarters of GCHQ not only shows up in the imagery but also appears fully in the 3D buildings layer of Google Maps.
By contrast in France not only are military bases obscured, but so are things like prisons.
The thing the obscurers and their supporters seem to have forgotten is foreign spy satellites or even foreign commercial imaging satellites. Getting hold of unblurred imagery of French things is trivially easy: simply go to Chinese and/or Russian sources. Similarly getting hold of unblurred/distorted Chinese things is also trivially easy: simply go to American sources.
So more information is needed from you: firstly what country are you talking about? Then are you talking about satellite/aerial background imagery being censored or the location of observations themselves being censored?
If the background imagery then you’re barking up entirely the wrong tree. Talk to the imagery providers rather than iNaturalist.
If the observations themselves then you’re likely on a highway to nowhere. Why? Simple. Censoring of the observations of employees of secret institutions whilst on the grounds of those institutions is the job of those institutions. iNaturalist not only has nothing to do with it, nor should they have anything to do with it.
Sorry I still don’t understand. That looks like it has to do with whoever supplies the satellite imagery. On iNaturalist individual observations, or observations belonging to sensitive taxa, are obscured. Locations can be private. Map imagery has nothing to do with iNaturalist.
iNaturalist uses Google for satellite imagery. In the second example you posted, it is already “masked” for me on the iNaturalist Explore page as well.
I think it’s safe to say that iNaturalist won’t be making decisions about whether or not to intentionally make aerial photos blurry in specific locations.
One, unblurred aerial image of a tiny part of said military base near Lisbon. Simply found by using the Russian online mapping service Yandex and reproduced by taking a screenshot. The whole of that base can be viewed unblurred on a simple internet site.
I’m not advocating compromising Portuguese national security. I’m merely pointing out how silly the blurring effort is in the modern world. Since you’ve confirmed you’re talking about the background imagery then there’s really nothing more to say.
