A big part of Brest (France) is pixelated in Google Maps. Why?

by provenzal

27 comments
  1. There is a naval base of French navy in Brest. I suppose that’s it.

  2. Have you tried deactivating SafeSearch? Google automatically blurs Brests.

  3. France has a law against aerial or sattelite photographing of certain areas, mostly military bases, nuclear power plants and jails. Brest is the homeport of France’s nuclear ballistic submarines, so this would be my guess without looking at the actual map.

  4. Pro-tip: if google map doesn’t show it, it’s usually military

  5. “How do we keep our military/nuclear, etc. facilities from their locations being known?”

    “Let’s blur them out”

    “Hey! What are those blurred out spots on Google images?”

    “They must be military/nuclear, etc. facilities that don’t want their locations to be known”

    “So… how do we keep our military/nuclear, etc. facilities from their locations being known?”

    “I think we might have hit a little snag here”

  6. As others said – usually military or otherwise government areas that given country requested to be censored. Unfortunately, a lot of countries (still) do that, which is stupid as hell because in vast majority of cases you are just a few clicks away of another maps and aerial/satellite photos provider that just does not care and publishes everything. I never remember this website’s address so usually I just search the place’s name in wikipedia and on the right pane click the coordinates, this takes me to [a list like this one](https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Brest,_France&params=48.39_N_4.49_W_type:city(139456)_region:FR-BRE) and it’s just a matter of clicking through a few of the providers to find one without censoring. In the case of Brest Mapquest and Yandex works.

  7. Area 51 is less pixelated. Looks like an exercise in seeing how much someone could demand from Google.

  8. I noticed this a lot in Portugal too when I was there. A couple of parts of Lisbon were blurred out. Nowhere as much as this though

  9. Try using different program, you have nothing Toulouse.

  10. Brests are fine, but they always pixelate the nipple.

  11. Google often blur military facilities. You have to use Russian (Yandex) or Chinese (Baidu) maps instead.

  12. Pretty common in military bases in some countries (here in spain too). You can actually unblurred them with google earth using the previous pictures function

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