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You can get way higher zoom/detail from cheap drones compare to GoogleMaps: https://www.mobiddiction.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Drone-view-mobi-map.jpg

You can get way higher zoom/detail from cheap drones compare to GoogleMaps: https://www.mobiddiction.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Drone-view-mobi-map.jpg https://www.mobiddiction.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/D... You can use stereoscopy from overlapping drone images to get depth maps: https://www.mobiddiction.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Team_Photo_5._V2.jpg https://www.mobiddiction.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/T... I have no doubt major world powers have satellites that can match and exceed those sorts of capabilities from space, instead of from 100m up, but if you can get end users to pay for it themselves, why the hell wouldn’t you take it. (Note, that was a DJI drone, and I would have no real surprise if the Chinese couldn’t have taken all my imagery if they’d wanted to. I _might_ have noticed them exfiltrating a few 10s of GB of data somehow, but I might not have as well… They are already geo fencing every single flight it makes, to trigger a warning and ensure I can’t fly over airports (or out the front of my house, since I’m only a few km out one on the flight path from my local airport). I’d hardly be surprised if the drone triggered some other action if someone chose to fly one near/over a nuclear reactor or a military base…

sandworm101 5y ago
Also think of angles. At 100m your drone is looking down, in basically the same direction as a satellite. But during those few seconds when you takeoff/land your camera is probably pointing sideways, a perspective that a satellite cannot replicate. Rather than simply a higher resolution, those few seconds at low altitudes give a very different perspective on an object. If you want to see the underside of a bridge, to determine if its support can handle tanks, you won't get that information looking down from 100m. You will get it looking sideways from 2m.
notahacker 5y ago
You can get much better detail from drones if the drone happens to be pointing at what you're interested at in a time frame you're interested in. And, as you point out, if they can get the GB of data back. China has access to better Earth Observation resources than Google Maps anyway, so a collection of EO imagery from tasked satellites of different types up to 0.25m pixels of something they actually want to monitor when they want to monitor it is a lot more useful than even higher resolution image collections of some random farm at random times. The latter wouldn't be entirely useless for intelligence purposes if the backdoor exists, but neither is Googling for images of locations voluntarily uploaded to the public web by smartphone users...

sandworm101 5y ago

Also think of angles. At 100m your drone is looking down, in basically the same direction as a satellite. But during those few seconds when you takeoff/land your camera is probably pointing sideways, a perspective that a satellite cannot replicate. Rather than simply a higher resolution, those few seconds at low altitudes give a very different perspective on an object. If you want to see the underside of a bridge, to determine if its support can handle tanks, you won't get that information looking down from 100m. You will get it looking sideways from 2m.

notahacker 5y ago

You can get much better detail from drones if the drone happens to be pointing at what you're interested at in a time frame you're interested in. And, as you point out, if they can get the GB of data back. China has access to better Earth Observation resources than Google Maps anyway, so a collection of EO imagery from tasked satellites of different types up to 0.25m pixels of something they actually want to monitor when they want to monitor it is a lot more useful than even higher resolution image collections of some random farm at random times. The latter wouldn't be entirely useless for intelligence purposes if the backdoor exists, but neither is Googling for images of locations voluntarily uploaded to the public web by smartphone users...