Google Maps now hides reviews, photos, and key features unless you're logged in. One of the internet's most essential utilities just became a walled garden.
Maps used to be the example of Google doing something genuinely useful for everyone. Now they're using it to force account creation and harvest more data. This is the enshittification of infrastructure - taking something that worked for everyone and making it worse to extract value.
Here's what Google is hiding behind the sign-in wall: user reviews of businesses, photos uploaded by contributors, detailed information about places, and various crowdsourced features that made Maps better than just directions. You can still get basic navigation without signing in, but the useful community features are gone.
Google's stated reason is improving personalization and security. The real reason is obvious: they want your data. Every search you make signed in, every place you look up, every review you read - that's data Google can use to build advertising profiles and train AI models. The quality of Maps has nothing to do with it.
This matters because Maps isn't optional for most people. It's infrastructure. Need directions? Maps. Looking up a business? Maps. Trying to figure out if a restaurant is any good? Maps reviews. Google built a monopoly by being free and useful, and now they're leveraging that monopoly to force compliance.
The pattern is familiar: build something useful and free, get everyone dependent on it, start restricting features to extract value. Twitter did it. Reddit did it. Now Google Maps is doing it. Each time, the justification is improving the user experience. Each time, it's actually about monetization and control.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that Google Maps was already profitable. They show ads, they sell API access, businesses pay for prominent placement. This isn't about survival - it's about maximizing extraction from a captive user base.
The privacy implications are significant. When you use Maps signed in, Google tracks everywhere you search for, everywhere you navigate to, everything you look up. That data is combined with your Gmail, YouTube, search history, and everything else Google knows about you. Forcing sign-in isn't about making Maps better - it's about eliminating the option to use it privately.
