The country will soon no longer be one of the few nations in the world where Google Maps doesn’t work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers.
The approval was made “on the condition that strict security requirements are met,” the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said in a statement.
Those conditions include blurring military and other sensitive security-related facilities, as well as restricting longitude and latitude coordinates for South Korean territory on products such as Google Maps and Google Earth, it said.
The decision is expected to hurt Naver and Kakao – local internet giants which currently dominate the country’s market for digital map services.
“We welcome today’s decision and look forward to our ongoing collaboration with local officials to bring a fully functioning Google Maps to Korea,” Google Vice-President Cris Turner said in a statement.
South Korea, still technically at war with North Korea, had shot down Google’s previous bids in 2007 and 2016 to be allowed to export the data, citing the risks that information about sensitive military and security facilities could be exposed.
The data in question is 1:5000 scale data, where 1cm on a map represents 50m in actual distance. Google has argued it needs to export the data to provide real-time navigation information worldwide.
This includes people researching South Korean destinations from overseas.
The conditions stipulate that Google must process map data on locally based servers and is only allowed to export data related to navigation and direction services that have been pre-approved by the government.
The South Korean government also reserves the right to request revisions to maps, and Google must set up a security incident prevention framework to respond to emergency issues. — Reuters
