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In 2005, a DreamWorks animation tool developer named Paul Rademacher was looking for a new place to live in the Bay Area. This being the primitive pre-geoweb era, he was apartment hunting with stone knives and bearskins: a new sheaf of MapQuest printouts every time he left the house. The programmer part of his brain knew that this was wrong. It was inelegant. Google Maps had launched two months previously, and Rademacher admired its smoothly scrolling maps. Wait a minute, he thought. This map is just JavaScript running in my browser, so therefore I can change it. Why can’t I just combine it with the list of for-rent apartments on Craigslist? Google Maps hadn’t yet released an API—application programming interface, a guide for users to interact with the software—so Rademacher proceeded by trial and error, tweaking numbers at random in the unintelligible text representing map layout, just to see what would happen. A few weeks later, he ran his script and watched a scatter of apartments appear in his browser, neatly forming the shape of the San Francisco peninsula. It was the first Google Earth “mashup” ever created, but within a month there were dozens of copycats using Rademacher’s code. Gas prices, movie showtimes, red-light cameras, package tracking, street crime—it seemed as if almost everything people wanted to look up on the Internet was a little more convenient displayed on a map.

“We all just hadn’t realized that a map could be a platform,” says Rademacher, who today works for Google Maps API team, managing the same interfaces he once hacked. Maps are millennia old, one of the earliest forms of representation ever devised by humankind, but new mobile technology has given them new versatility, and the result has been a map renaissance. Twenty years ago, most people probably consulted a map once every week or so, when they needed help navigating a highway or a shopping mall. Today it’s not unusual for smartphone owners to check a map many times an hour, for things that we wouldn’t have associated with geography at all ten years ago—not just “Where’s Romania?” but “Where’s my pizza?” For geonerds, accustomed to the public perception of a map as something démodé and dull, it’s like living in a golden age.

Wayne Coyne, the lead singer of the beloved indie-rock band the Flaming Lips, may have summed this up best. In 2009, Google Street View* users noticed that the map photos of Coyne’s street in Oklahoma City included puzzling shots of the front man sitting, fully clothed, in a bathtub on his front lawn. He explained to an interviewer that he’d been trying out some props to scare neighborhood kids at a Halloween party and had no idea he was about to be immortalized by Google’s amazingly comprehensive street photography. “A car that drives around on every street with a 360-degree camera?” he marveled. “We live in f——ing good times, don’t we?”

But for every ebullient Wayne Coyne, it seems, there’s some gloomy Cassandra warning against the new maps and the technologies they leverage. If you thought the worst part of location-based services was going to be advertisements that annoy you by name as you walk past them, like in Minority Report, think again. Jerome Dobson, a GIS pioneer and president of the American Geographical Society, has coined the word “geoslavery” to refer to the potential threat to our privacy and autonomy that GPS-powered maps might someday pose. If everything you do is geotagged, then everyone always knows where you are—which is awesome if you’re hoping to meet some friends after work for a drink but maybe not so awesome if potential burglars are casing your neighborhood to find out who’s not home, or if you’re dealing with an abusive ex or a child predator or even some stranger who got mad about something you posted online. We’re an Orwellian dystopia in the making, says Dobson, except that no shadowy government will be providing the surveillance. Instead, we’re opting to do it to ourselves.

With Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto in mind, I ask Paul Rademacher