TORONTO – Just weeks after Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt traveled to North Korea to examine online policies, Google maps has updated its once barren map of the region, known for its restrictive online policies.
Included in the update is North Korea’s capital Pyongyang, which once appeared bare on Google Maps, but now displays street names, subway stops and hospitals.
“For a long time, one of the largest places with limited map data has been North Korea. But today we are changing that with the addition of more detailed maps of North Korea in Google Maps,” said senior product manager of Google Map Maker Jayanth Mysore in a blog post.
Maps of North Korea have been hard to come by due to the ongoing conflict between North and South Korea.
Before update:
After update:
The maps were updated by a community of citizen cartographers, using Google Map Maker to add their contributions, over a “few years” according to the blog post. Google Map Maker, created in 2008, works similar to Wikipedia, by allowing users to add and update geographic information for users to see in Google Maps and Google Earth.
Google uses Map Maker in order for users to add local information like businesses, school campuses, or local attractions, to keep their maps up to date. Google then reviews the information for approval.
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“While many people around the globe are fascinated with North Korea, these maps are especially important for the citizens of South Korea who have ancestral connections or still have family living there,” read the Google blog post.
Mysore notes in the blog that creating maps is crucial to helping people access information about parts of the world that are unfamiliar to them.
Google’s update will not have much effect on those living in North Korea, as many of its citizens only have access to a domestic Intranet system, not the World Wide Web, making Internet use strictly regulated and allowed only with approval.
But the maps will play an important role in recording North Korea’s history and landmarks – including their infamous gulags, secret labor camps where as many as 200,000 prisoners are reportedly held.
According to a global awareness campaign for human rights in North Korea, the camps were established by Kim II Sung, North Korean dictator from 1948 to 1994, to impression political traitors and were used as “propaganda to terrify North Koreans into absolute commitment to the regime.”
Reportedly some of those now incarcerated in gulags are North Koreans who tried to flee the country – a move restricted by the government.
“The internment camps operate under a “guilt-by-association” system (yeon-jwa-je), which means that extended family members of the accused – for up to three generations – are also punished,” read the North Korea Now website.
The latest Google Maps update shows the Hoeryong Gullag “Camp 22,” located near the North’s northeast border with China.
Though the gulags are displayed as grayed-out areas on the map, once zoomed-in, markers identify areas of the camp, including a guards’ restroom, a pharmaceutical factory and a food factory.
This is not the first time Google has shed light on the country’s camps.
Earlier in January an economics student at George Mason University in Virginia reported that he has spotted a new North Korean internment camp through satellite images on Google Earth.
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