China will introduce new net mapping rules to prevent disclosure of sensitive information such as location of army bases, officials said, adding that anyone who would violate the regulations may face seven to 10 years jail term.

"Those who upload maps to the Internet that display sensitive military locations may be in breach of laws prohibiting disclosure of state secrets and can face seven to 10 years jail term," Chinese officials said.

Authorities are strengthening the supervision of although Internet maps are popular, it is a problem if they include sensitive information such as location of army bases, the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM) said.

Song Chaozhi, deputy director of SBSM said an investigation would be launched to detect problematic Internet map sites.

Under the latest standard, qualified online map servers must have no record of information leakage in any form in the past three years, another official newspaper China Daily said.

The new regulation includes all maps downloaded or copied from the Internet onto cell phones and handheld computers, it said adding that by December officials will also crack down on unregistered or illegal Internet map servers and release blacklist to the public.

Some site administrators that provide Internet maps and related services are unaware that they may be in violation of certain laws. That's until last month when an online forum frequented by military enthusiasts was ordered to close.

The national surveying and mapping bureau reportedly punished three Germans who collected geographic information in Yichang, Hubei province and later mapped these in computers, it said.

Similarly, the Longyan bureau of land and resources in Fujian province reportedly meted out administrative punishment to a Japanese who measured 195 locations inside Longyan and located 80 of them on his map, it said.

In April 2010, the Shenzhen land planning and supervision team detected a website named Moon-bbs.com, where confidential geographic information including military airports and locations of nuclear test explosions were published.

The website was reportedly linked to the server of a foreign map website, where users can scan high-definition satellite pictures worldwide free of charge and mark the location or relevant information of a military site.

In another website called Godeyes, a well-known portal based on Google Earth with 440,000 registered users, people can pilot virtual planes from Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, to Beijing.

China has about 42,000 Internet map websites and as the number grows, more cases of information leakage were reported.