Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [105]
Overseeing his digital dominion certainly isn’t getting any easier. The library of aerial photographs that coats Google Earth—taken from satellites, planes, hot-air balloons, even camera-equipped kites—is growing exponentially. “All the pictures that have ever been taken are less than what we’re going to have next year,” McClendon tells me.* The eventual goal is centimeter-per-pixel imagery for the entire globe: every square centimeter of the (real) Earth’s surface would be its own pixel on Google Earth, not unlike Lewis Carroll’s imaginary map. That goal is still more than twenty years away, McClendon guesses, since there are still places on Google Earth where the resolution is fifteen meters per pixel, more than a thousand times chunkier. And even once all three dimensions are sorted out, engineers must still grapple with the fourth dimension: time. Google Earth has assembled a library of historical photographs, so you can watch the years advance from orbit, but there’s the future to worry about as well—the Sisyphean task of keeping the map up to date. Users can already watch real-time features like weather and traffic cross the surface of Google Earth, but, says McClendon, “The much harder truth is human truth. Does this business still exist? Is that a phone number? Is the location of the doorway here? These are the questions we have to get right if you’re going to run the Google Maps navigation in your phone and get to the right business, which is effectively what pays the bills.”
Google’s mapping arm is a big moneymaker for the Internet giant; McClendon points out that 90 percent of all retail spending still happens offline, and that’s powered by geographic technology like mapping and local search. But Google Maps and Earth have also become a lightning rod for geopolitical controversy. China might crack down because of Google “mistakes” like not labeling Taiwan as one of its provinces, or Nicaragua might use a misdrawn border in Google Maps as a rationale for a military incursion into Costa Rican territory. Sometimes Google will buy third-party images that have fabricated or blurred certain sensitive areas. Most famously, after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory stayed stubbornly fuzzy long after Google had found alternate sources that unblurred other sensitive spots, like the White House and the Capitol. Google finally secured uncensored photography of Chez Cheney and pushed it onto an Earth update as soon as they could—which happened to be Obama’s inauguration day. (“I would have done it sooner had I found the pixels sooner!” McClendon still insists.) Scuffles like these have forced Google Earth to begin acting, in some ways, as an actual nation-state, negotiating with governments and even sending its own representative to meetings of the UN committee on place-names.
Should we be worried about the fact that a single company, however awesome its rotating holiday logos and employee snacks, has this much authoritative influence on the world’s maps? At the dawn of the Internet mapping era, some geographers fretted about a coming “McDonaldization” of cartography, in which maps would become fast food: cheap and omnipresent but driven by distant, unaccountable corporations concerned more with ad revenue than quality. In reality, far from skimping on quality, Google has continued to add blow-your-mind features (3-D underwater terrain! Street View–level mapping of ski trails!* Interactive global warming models!) to its maps on a seemingly weekly basis. But Google Earth’s unprecedented detail and popularity have led to more serious concerns about privacy and security. After all, any map of Mumbai that can help tourists find their hotel can also help terrorists attack