Daniel Schwarz highlights the staggering, seasonal faults in Google Maps' landscapes

“Well if it’s in the papers then it must be true!” was a sarcastic quip that your elders would say when you were relaying a tall story you had read earlier that day. Not much has changed, but nowadays we lay a lot of trust in websites rather than broadsheets. Daniel Schwarz doesn’t trust the apps and websites we rely on for so much these days, and has spent a painstakingly long time searching out area of Google maps where, due to the land being photographed at different time, the entire topography can change entirely and is, essentially, false. In Daniel’s own words:

“Although the satellite images give users a godlike power in jumping from one continent to the next in the blink of an eye, they are also highly abstracted from time, nature and their interrelationships. Google Maps images are not updated in real time, but instead stem from several months or years old datasets. Their exact dates remain unknown to the user…The images arise from glitches which are created automatically when Google Maps’ algorithm stitches images of updated photos with prior recorded ones together in a grid- like view.”