Google Maps personalization could hurt public space and engagement

As far as Google is concerned, services like this are very clearly what they are most interested in offering; convenient personalised digital experiences based on all the data we're willing to feed it. And, hell, they are getting pretty damn good at it!

Which is not to say that local community engagement is not a valid problem to solve. Just that, it's one for a different organisation.

It's like web surfing or hunting through Wikipedia. Each click changes the map and exposes you to more stuff. What's true is that a search will spotlight the things most relevant to you ("coffee"), but that means the highly related coffee joints by you, your friends, zagat, are slightly bigger on the map, it does not eliminate the other coffee joints, just visually ranks them differently (smaller, or just a small dot)

Compared to the old google maps, where a search for coffee would return hundreds of little red dots that you'd have to click on before you could even see what they were, the new maps is far better because it shows more information up front, and clicking the lower ranked stuff is done better,

I've spent hours just exploring stuff on the new maps, finding places I never knew about by clicking new stuff as it appears on the map.

Search doesn't only show you sites you've visited in the past. If that was it's only metric for displaying results you'd never be able to search in the first place. Obviously that's a little extreme, but Maps will have the same requirements as Search; they need to help you find what you want to find. If you they don't, people will slowly stop using them. If they don't show me the pizza place I want, I'm going to get frustrated, and next time I'll just jump straight to GrubHub instead.

This all of the sudden looks like a nightmare to me, post NSA Prism. You aren't getting that info from me. Not Google, not Facebook.