Grafcan’s images of Canary Islands are censored

Pamela at Secret Tenerife does a much more thorough job of translating the local media’s stories about the the recent aging of Google Earth’s local satellite imagery. Tidbits:

It appears that someone from Google came to the archipelago in August 2005 and one of their commercial directors reached an agreement, “free of economic exchanges”, with Grafcan for Grafcan to provide the images. Apparently, Grafcan are the first European company to obtain such an agreement.

Bernardo Pizarro, managing director of Grafcan, says that they have received a lot of complaints from users who want to see up-to-date images.

There is much more there worth reading. The most worrying aspect of her post, however, is that she points out Grafcan’s imagery is censored. Here is what the military base at Gando looks like:

gando.jpg

This is always the danger if you accept locally generated imagery subject to national security laws. I’m betting DigitalGlobe’s imagery wasn’t censored. So maybe, if what James Fee reports is true, we can soon have it back?:-)

2 thoughts on “Grafcan’s images of Canary Islands are censored”

  1. Thanks for the mention Stefan. I’ll try to keep my eys on the situation and if anything new comes up locally, report it back here.

  2. Yo can bet on it. Digital Globe imagery wasn’t censored, and indeed you could saw perfectly some F-18 at Gando… Curiosly, in this new images the military naval base in Las Palmas is clearly visible, with no censorship….

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