SEARCH FOR ISRAEL IN THE satellite view of Google Maps and you’ll see beige strips of desert, brown crinkles of mountain, and the deep-blue tongue of the Dead Sea. Try to zoom in, however, and the online mapping service thwarts your curiosity: Anything smaller than roughly six feet across, anywhere in the country, looks fuzzy. Do the same thing in many other parts of the world, and it’s possible to spot street lamps, bushes, and even individual pedestrians.
Today, it’s unusual not to be able to zero in on an address using Google’s exhaustive map of the globe. Blurred sites are the outliers, which makes them stand out even more. The Marcoule Nuclear Site in southern France is pixelated, for example; part of the western coast of North Korea is blurry; and so is Belgium’s Fort Eben-Emael—a fortress predating World War II. Governments can ask Google to obscure sensitive locations, and in many cases, the tech giant complies.
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