Coca-cola accused of illegaly mapping china

Mrch 2013

U.S. soft drink giant coca-cola was accused by chinese authorities of illegaly mapping a remote southern western province of china. Cyber-security row between Beijing and Washington had been simmerring when this incident occured.

Coca-cola was accused of using hand-held GPS equipment to collect classified information which they would later hand over to U.S. intelligence.

Coca-cola countered by stating that its local bottling plants had used electronic mapping and related methods to run its operations in the country more efficiently and that incident was not an exception.

A Coca-cola spokesman had stated: " Over the last several years, some of our local bottling plants in china have adopted logistics solutions to improve our customer service and fuell efficiency. " He continued: " These include e-map and location-based customer logistics that are commercially availlable in china through authorized local supplies."

The Yunnan authorities had claimed that the Coca-cola incident was one of 21 cases of ellegal surveying investigated in the area then. Other instances included the ellegal sale of classified military maps online, aerial photography by unmanned aircraft and ellegaly surveyeing military intallations.

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