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Google Maps knows where you live.
Google Maps knows where you work.
Google Maps knows the doctor you visited on Tuesday.
Google Maps knows the bar you went to on Friday.
Google Maps knows how long you spent at your ex's apartment.
Every route. Every store. Every restaurant. Timestamped. Logged. Forever.
On November 14, 2022, Google was caught tracking users who had explicitly turned off location history. They paid $391.5 million to settle with 40 US state attorneys general. The largest internet privacy settlement in American history.
Then in September 2023, California fined them another $93 million for the same thing.
You are not using a free map app. You are wearing a tracking device that happens to give directions.
On December 20, 2020, two developers named Alexander Borsuk and Viktar Havaka walked out on their employer. They had spent years building a maps app called MAPS.ME on top of OpenStreetMap data. The owner had pushed a closed-source build that broke the community's trust. They forked the project the same day. They registered organicmaps.app the next morning. They started over.
It is called Organic Maps. Six years later, six million people use it.
→ Full offline maps. Download a country once. No internet needed.
→ Turn-by-turn voice navigation for walking, cycling, and driving.
→ Hiking trails, cycling routes, contour lines, elevation profiles.
→ Public transport and subway maps for major cities.
→ Wikipedia articles for places of interest baked in.
→ Bookmarks and GPX tracks for travelers.
→ Dark mode. Offline search. Battery sipping by design.
→ iOS, Android, F-Droid, Huawei AppGallery.
→ No GPS data sent anywhere. Your location stays on your device.
→ No ads. No tracking. No analytics. No account. No phoning home.
Verified by the Exodus Privacy Project: zero trackers, zero spy permissions. Verified by TrackerControl on iOS: same result. Auditable on GitHub. Not a marketing claim.
Here is the wildest part:
The whole thing runs on donations.
The servers are donated by Mythic Beasts, an ISP that gives them 400 terabytes of bandwidth every month for free. 44+ Technologies in Vietnam donates a dedicated server worth $12,000 a year so Southeast Asia downloads maps fast. NLnet handed them a European Commission grant to improve search and fonts. 100 contributors wrote 1,500 commits in 2025 alone. None of them got paid.
10 petabytes of map data served in 2025. $0 revenue. $0 trackers.
Google Maps: Free. Settled $484.5 million in tracking lawsuits.
Apple Maps: Free. Still reports to Apple.
Waze: Free. Owned by Google.
Organic Maps: Free. Tracks nothing. Works offline. Forever.
One honest flag: in April 2025, some contributors raised governance concerns and forked a sister project called CoMaps. Both apps are alive. The privacy crowd watches both.
13,963 stars. 1,397 forks. Apache 2.0.
But DO NOT install Organic Maps.
We should all keep letting Google track where we sleep.
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