Apple Maps puts all buildings back in Gaza

(twitter.com)

56 points | by newspaper1 2 hours ago

7 comments

  • giancarlostoro 1 hour ago
    Are we just making assumptions? I've built up a few different mapping / GIS related projects over my career, and the satellite imagery can change on a whim, sometimes its spot on, other times its dated, the zoom can also affect it as well, you zoom in and its from years back, you zoom out slightly, and its from last week.

    Has Apple made any remark about this to confirm? It would not surprise me if Apple just isn't even aware of this changing on their app. (For those unaware, they source their map data from various sources / vendors, as does Microsoft's Bing Maps.)

    Edit:

    The account that posted the tweet is considered "satire" and antisemitic. I also looked into when Apple Maps last updated, they stopped showing any live data in the region back in 2023 after October 7th, even in Israel. The post is highly misleading to spark outrage.

    • dig1 1 hour ago
      > It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple simply isn’t aware that this has changed in its app.

      Yet they were pretty quick to change Lake Ontario to Lake America. OTOH, if Apple has no idea what its own app is serving, that shows poor state of their monitoring system, right?

      • vfosnar 47 minutes ago
        This is satellite imagery. Its common for this to be outdated af, especially outside of EU/US. It costs A LOT to process these compared to just switching a single label in a database.

        If there's anything to worry about it's that MS will stop providing aerial imagery to https://www.hotosm.org/ as it seems they slowly give up on Bing maps altogether. Cool they atl donated em so far.

    • OgsyedIE 1 hour ago
      The deletion of place names, roads, business labels, etc throughout the southern half of Lebanon suggests that there's basically no way ignorance is involved.
    • slowin 38 minutes ago
      Why would Apple make a remark about this? You can literally go look for yourself and see they've done this. As another commenter pointed out, they almost immediately removed the names of ethnically cleansed towns from Southern Lebanon as Israel wiped them off the map.

      > The account that posted the tweet is considered "satire" and antisemitic.

      Says who?

  • Pfhortune 1 hour ago
    This is truly ghastly. I can excuse the capitulation on the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario as being issues of locality during a strange and broken administration. But this is... truly a horrifying, willing, cover for ongoing human-rights atrocities and violence. What justification exists for this?
  • megous 1 hour ago
    Google doesn't show reality in the north either. It's completely destroyed there too, in the same manner as in Rafah. East Gaza City is also leveled completely.

    And it's not like they don't have the data. You can see in Google Earth "archive" how the whole map is a patchwork of randomly old tiles.

  • bitpush 1 hour ago
    I want to believe this is a glitch but then again with Tim Cook (and Apple) has shown many times that he'll do whatever it takes for being in the good graces of the administration.
  • OgsyedIE 1 hour ago
    Are insurance firms wargaming the possibility of tech CEOs being invited to Brazil, Indonesia, etc as part of a grand investment summit only to have their persons and legal teams be arrested on arrival in a rugpull, whether the rugpulling country locks them up or dismembers them? Are flight corridors being specially set up to prevent fighter plane interception?

    It's less ridiculous than you think. Surveying five frontier LLMs just now four of them gave a probability above 20% that it may happen this quarter, let alone before the end of next year.

    • tkel 1 hour ago
      This number isn't real lol, you can't calculate these things mathematically , you might be having AI psychosis. Your comment also appears AI generated
      • OgsyedIE 1 hour ago
        The writing level of your comment history is between 7th and 8th grade and you appear to be totally unaware of the field of forecasting or the fact that LLMs are benchmarked on it, which suggests that of whatever holes there may be in my above comment, it'll only be somebody who isn't you that could say what they are.

        Furthermore, a simple test of whether I typed out my above comment by hand (as I did) is whether each word is syntactically correct. The word rug-pulling is correct but I did not use it because I prefer the way rugpulling sounds inside the inner monologue as I type it. LLMs, however, are insistent on having perfect syntax, grammar and semantics, even if they keep fucking up the pragmatics.

        • tkel 25 minutes ago
          OK, this comment is even more nonsensical , I'm convinced you're just a bot
  • nelox 1 hour ago
    Apple did not restore any content; the visuals simply had not been refreshed. The most recent update occurred in 2023.
    • SailorJerry 1 hour ago
      Why is this being downvoted? Is it factually inaccurate?
      • Sabinus 27 minutes ago
        Because this is the new culture war topic. Check out OP's history.

        This is their moral crusade. Which would be good if it was aimed at compelling Israel to offer a decent 2 state deal and pull out the settlers (with much Israeli weeping and gnashing of teeth), and compelling the Palestinians to accept it. But instead we get absolutist "Israel is evil and must be dissolved" and we're back to the cycle of violence.

        • newspaper1 6 minutes ago
          Being against genocide and Israel occupying my government isn't a "culture war", which is exactly why people across the political spectrum from left to right are anti-Zionist.
  • nailer 1 hour ago
    > JUST IN: Apple Maps has put all the buildings back in Gaza, because the easiest solution to a genocide is to pretend it isn't happening.

    There's no genocide in Gaza. From the WSJ:

    > Net of people fleeing the country, the change in Gaza’s population is roughly zero. Not minus 40%. The population even appears to have grown in 2025, before the cease-fire in October.

    https://www.wsj.com/opinion/free-expression/naza-has-nada-on...

    • hackingonempty 0 minutes ago
      If you took some time to read and understand the definition of genocide from the Genocide Convention then you wouldn't make such statements. There is no change in population or minimum number of deaths required for a determination of genocide.

          any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
      
          (a) Killing members of the group;
          (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
          (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
          (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
          (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.