Google this week denied an accusation from a widely-cited Ukrainian Twitter account that the tech company had changed its policy on blurring sensitive military sites on satellite images published on its Maps platform.
Twitter account @ArmedForcesUkr, which is unverified but has over 460,000 followers and has been retweeted by official Ukrainian accounts many times over the last two months, claimed in a viral post that Google Maps had “opened access to Russia’s military and strategic facilities.”
The tweet included photographs of Russian military equipment, vehicles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, command posts, and more. The tweet appeared to suggest that Google had purposely ensured that the satellite images were clear enough to prove that Russia was using the weapons, in a move that goes against Google’s normal policy of blurring sensitive sites.
“Now everyone can see a variety of Russian launchers, intercontinental ballistic missile mines, command posts, and secret landfills with a resolution of about 0.5 meters per pixel,” the tweet claimed.
With hundreds of quote tweets and thousands of retweets, the post quickly established a narrative that Google was working to ensure that the world could see the equipment used by the Russian military – but an official spokesperson for the company denied the claim.
The tweet was referenced by Russia’s Moscow Times, which inaccurately claimed that the photographs were “newly accessible.”
No Change to Google Policy
Speaking to technology news website The Verge, Google spokeswoman Genevieve Park said that the company has not “made any blurring changes” to its satellite imagery in Russia.
Google Maps already blurs satellite images that depict areas that world governments and militaries intend to keep private, with the French Air Force’s 705 airbase being a good example of that. In the United States, Area 51 is also blurred.
However, not every single military base is blurred in the same way and the photographs shared by @ArmedForcesUkr did not include any information about their whereabouts.
While Google did not unblur the satellite images, the technology company has paused all advertisement sales in the country and complied with Western sanctions that forced the company to drop access to Google Pay services for some Russian Android users.
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
