New campaign targets illegal online maps
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Authorities are stepping up efforts in a special campaign to crack down on unlicensed mapping service providers and take down online maps that violate Chinese laws, said a senior official from the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM).
Xu Deming, Director General of the SBSM, said Sunday at the launch ceremony of the National Geographic Information Science and Technology Industrial Park in Beijing that inspections would be carried out on all mapping service providers and online maps until August.
The authorities will check if mapping service providers are licensed and whether online maps contain information that disclose State secrets.
Unqualified service providers will be closed down by authorities if they refuse to rectify or take down unmodified online maps, Xu said.
According to SBSM statistics, the bureau has uncovered 1,058 cases of illegal mapping services, including more than 30 cases relating to foreign organizations and military, since January 2009.
The bureau said that 3,686 websites out of 41,670 web mapping service websites were found to contain political mistakes, and more than 200 websites were closed.
In May 2010, China ruled that all online mapping service providers should be licensed with the SBSM before the designated deadline of March 31, 2010.
Those that failed to comply would be shut down or blocked by June.
"Our bureau has made plans based on the SBSM's notice to carry out inspections in the province," an official from the Shandong Provincial Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told the Global Times Monday.
"We will fully cooperate with the inspectors. We also have our own censorship, as we ensure the map used on the website is qualified, and we have also set up a database of sensitive words," Chen Wei from sina.com told the Global Times.
"We submit our mapping database to authorities for approval every three months," he said.
