Regardless of the identity of the satellite, this image is remarkable for several reasons.
First, despite so many satellites flying in space, it’s still rare to see a real picture—not just an artist’s illustration—of what one actually looks like in orbit. For example, SpaceX has released photos of Starlink satellites in launch configuration, where dozens of the spacecraft are stacked together to fit inside the payload compartment of the Falcon 9 rocket. But there are fewer well-resolved views of a satellite in its operational environment, with solar arrays extended like the wings of a bird.
This is changing as commercial companies place more and more imaging satellites in orbit. Several companies provide “non-Earth imaging” services by repurposing Earth observation cameras to view other objects in space. These views can reveal information that can be useful in military or corporate espionage.
Secondly, the Google Earth capture offers a tangible depiction of a satellite’s speed. An object in low-Earth orbit must travel at more than 17,000 mph (more than 27,000 km per hour) to keep from falling back into the atmosphere.
While the B-2’s motion caused it to appear a little smeared in the Google Earth image a few years ago, the satellite’s velocity created a different artifact. The satellite appears five times in different colors, which tells us something about how the image was made. Airbus’ Pleiades satellites take pictures in multiple spectral bands: blue, green, red, panchromatic, and near-infrared.
At lower left, the black outline of the satellite is the near-infrared capture. Moving up, you can see the satellite in red, blue, and green, followed by the panchromatic, or black-and-white, snapshot with the sharpest resolution. Typically, the Pleiades satellites record these images a split-second apart and combine the colors to generate an accurate representation of what the human eye might see. But this doesn’t work so well for a target moving at nearly 5 miles per second.
The Google Maps Timeline has long been a useful though slightly uncomfortable feature that maintains a complete record of everywhere your phone goes (and probably you with it). Google recently changed the way it stored timeline data to improve privacy, but the company now confirms that a “technical issue” resulted in many users losing their timeline history altogether, and there might not be any way to recover it.
Timeline, previously known as Location History, is very useful if you need to figure out where you were on a particular day or if you just can’t remember where you found that neat bar on your last vacation. Many Google users grew quite fond of having access to that data. However, Google had access to it, too. Starting in 2024, Google transitioned to storing Timeline data only on the user’s individual smartphone instead of backing it up to the cloud. You can probably see where this is going.
Users started piping up over the past several weeks, posting on the Google support forums, Reddit, and other social media that their treasured Timeline data had gone missing. Google has been investigating the problem, and the news isn’t good. In an email sent out over the weekend, Google confirmed what many already feared: Maps has accidentally deleted Timeline data on countless devices.
A Google spokesperson confirmed this is the result of a technical issue and not user error or an intentional change. It’s unclear how this happened, but we’d wager on a botched Maps update. Google usually rolls out updates in waves, and it’s possible that the defective build in this case made it to a large number of devices before it was stopped.
You have exactly one possible fix for this issue, but only if you planned ahead. When Google began the full change-over to local storage of Timeline data, it added several settings to control the feature. While the data is stored locally by default, you have the option of creating encrypted backups in the cloud. If you did that, you should be able to restore the data.
Whether you want to call it “Google Business Messaging” or “Google Business Profile Chat,” the chat buttons in Google Maps and Search are going away.
Google
This is the 2018 version of Google Maps Messaging, which is when it was first built into the Google Maps app.
Google
Messages used to have a top-tier spot in the navigation panel.
Google
In the current UI, Messages lives in the “Updates” tab.
Ron Amadeo
You used to be able to reply to Google Maps Messages with Google Allo.
Google is killing off a messaging service! This one is the odd “Google Business Messaging” service—basically an instant messaging client that is built into Google Maps. If you looked up a participating business in Google Maps or Google Search on a phone, the main row of buttons in the place card would read something like “Call,” “Chat,” “Directions,” and “Website.” That “Chat” button is the service we’re talking about. It would launch a full messaging interface inside the Google Maps app, and businesses were expected to use it for customer service purposes. Google’s deeply dysfunctional messaging strategy might lead people to joke about a theoretical “Google Maps Messaging” service, but it already exists and has existed for years, and now it’s being shut down.
Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz was the first to spot the shutdown emails being sent out to participating businesses. Google has two different support articles up for a shutdown of both “Google Business Profile Chat” and “Google Business Messages,” which appear to just be the same thing with different names. On July 15, 2024, the ability to start a new chat will be disabled, and on July 31, 2024, both services will be shut down. Google is letting businesses download past chat conversations via Google Takeout.
Google’s Maps messaging service was Google Messaging Service No. 16 in our giant History of Google Messaging article. The feature has undergone many changes, so it’s a bit hard to follow. The Google Maps Messaging button launched in 2017, when it would have been called “Google My Business Chat.” This wasn’t quite its own service yet—the messaging button would either launch your SMS app or boot into another dead Google messaging product, Google Allo!
The original SMS option was the easy path for small businesses with a single store, but SMS is tied to a single physical phone. If you’re a bigger business and want to take on the task of doing customer service across multiple stores, at the scale of Google Maps, that’s going to be a multi-person job. The Google Allo back-end (which feels like it was the driving force behind creating this project in the first place) would let you triage messages to multiple people. Allo was one year into its 2.5-year lifespan when this feature launched, though, so things would have to change soon before Allo’s 2019 shutdown date.
Knowing that the announcement of Allo’s death was a month away, Google started making Maps into its own standalone messaging service in November 2018. Previously, it would always launch an outside app (either SMS or Allo), but with this 2018 update, Maps got its own instant messaging UI built right into the app. “Messages” became a top-level item in the navigation drawer (later this would move to “updates”), and a third-party app was no longer needed. On the business side of things, a new “Google My Business” app would be the new customer service interface for all these messages. Allo’s shutdown in 2019 disabled the ability to use SMS for small businesses, and everything needed to use this Google My Business app now. Maps was officially a new messaging service. Google also created the “Business Messages API,” so big businesses could plug Maps messaging into some kind of customer management app.
It does not sound like Google is going to replace business messaging with anything in the near future, so the Chat buttons in Google Maps and search will be going away. In the endless pantheon of Google Messaging solutions, the Google Developer page also mentions an “RCS Business Messaging” platform that will launch the Google Messaging app. This service does not seem to be built into any existing Google products, though, and isn’t mentioned as an alternative in Google’s shutdown announcement. Google only suggests that businesses “redirect customers to your alternative communication channels,” but those links won’t be getting premium placement in Google’s products.
Business messaging is a pretty well-established market, and the Big Tech companies with competent messaging strategies are involved somehow. On iOS, there’s Apple’s iMessage-based Messages for Business, which also has a chat button layout in Apple Maps. Meta has both WhatsApp Business Messaging and Facebook Messenger’s Meta Business Messaging. There are also standalone businesses like Twilio.
Google announced big changes to its most legally fraught set of user settings: your location data. Google’s misleading Location History descriptions in Google Maps have earned it several lawsuits in the US and worldwide. A quick count involves individual lawsuits in California, Arizona, Washington, a joint lawsuit in Texas, Indiana, and the District of Columbia, and another joint lawsuit across 40 additional US states. Internationally, Google has also been sued in Australia over its location settings. The point is that any change to Google’s location settings must have some motive behind it, so bear with us while we try to decode everything.
Google’s big new location data change is a new, duplicate data store that will live exclusively on your device. Google’s new blog post says data for the long-running Google Maps Timeline feature will now “be saved right on your device—giving you even more control over your data.” That’s right, one of the world’s biggest Internet data companies advocates for local storage of your location data.
The company continues, “If you’re getting a new phone or are worried about losing your existing one, you can always choose to back up your data to the cloud so it doesn’t get lost. We’ll automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google.” Users will apparently have lots of control over this new locally stored data, with Google saying, “Soon, you’ll be able to see all your recent activity on Maps… in one central place, and easily delete your searches, directions, visits, and shares with just a few taps. The ability to delete place-related activity from Maps starts rolling out on Android and iOS in the coming weeks.”
Some companies pitch the “on-device storage” of data as a security feature. The idea is that on-device data isn’t in the cloud, and instead is encrypted on your device, and therefore is more secure since you must have physical access to the device to get the data. This is usually how biometrics are stored, for instance. That’s not happening here, though. Google’s post says, “The Timeline feature in Maps helps you remember places you’ve been and is powered by a setting called Location History.” Location History is all the location data collected by Google, and the Google Maps Timeline is only a subset of that data. So, with on-device storage, Google Maps Timeline will now be a second copy of a subset of your location data. Cloud-based Location History will still exist and still be collected. Instead of the additional security of encrypted on-device storage, this is less secure since your data will now be in two places, or maybe multiple places, if you have multiple devices.
Google was sued in nearly every US state because of its misleading communication about where your location data is stored and what the controls do. Before all the lawsuits, Google had a checkbox for “Location History” that you could turn on and off, but at the time, “Location History” didn’t mean “all the stored location history across your Google account.” Back then, “Location History” was the name of a specific page in Google Maps, and turning off the Location History checkbox just hid the Location History interface—it didn’t reduce Google’s location data collection and storage. Today, that has changed, and in the wake of all those lawsuits, Google says Location History actually controls the storage and collection of location data across your entire account.
Promoting controls for the “Google Maps Timeline” feels like Google is pulling the same old “Location History” trick. Data controls for the Maps Timeline don’t control the data for your entire account, but instead only control data for this specific interface in Google Maps. Google says you’ll get “the ability to delete place-related activity from Maps,” but that’s from Maps only. Let’s not fall for Google’s app-specific settings trick again: You don’t want the ability to delete location data “from Maps”; you want the ability to delete location data from “your entire account.”
Google’s new delete button doesn’t seem like it delete’s much.
Google
My interpretation of the strategy is that Google’s going to make two different copies of your location data, a cloud-based one that it has access to (Location History) and a locally stored one that it does not have access to (Google Maps Timeline), and it’s going to dangle a bunch of controls in front of users that control the local data store only. A pop-up (shown above) briefly shown in one of the blog post videos seems to confirm this, with the “Delete Maps Activity?” pop-up saying it won’t delete data from Location History or Web & App Activity. I guess the hope is that interested users will be distracted by the upfront controls for the unimportant, private, local data store and then forget about the more hidden controls for the cloud-based one that Google has access to.
Any justification for why the company is creating more complicated and confusing location controls is absent from Google’s blog post. What is the benefit of having an extra copy of locally stored location data? Why would you want two different copies of location data to manage? The only new feature you’re getting is the ability to delete data from the new local data store, but you wouldn’t need those controls if the data store didn’t exist in the first place. Why would users want to delete data from their local location history but not the cloud? A local copy of location data only makes sense if Google stops collecting and storing location data in the cloud; I can promise you that it’s not doing that.
