Google Map is celebrating its 15 th year of formation. Few apps made by a Big Tech company have improved more over the years than Google Maps. When it launched in 2005, it was a moderately better alternative to AOL’s MapQuest. With the rise of smartphones, it became truly essential to the lives of millions — upending incumbents whose entire business had been selling expensive, subscription-based in-car navigation systems.

 The company marked the occasion with a lightly refreshed design, including a good-looking new pin-shaped logo. “Overall, I think computing should work in a way where it’s much more intuitive to the way people live and not the other way around,”  Google’s Sundar Pichai says. “AR and Maps is really in the sweet spot of that, because as humans we’re walking around the world, perceiving a lot, trying to understand a lot.” Pichai says he sees a future in which Maps users are walking around and an AR layer of information is popping up in Maps, showing them vegetarian menu options at nearby restaurants.

That doesn’t mean AR in Google Maps works like magic now—or will in the near future. “We talk about the double-edge sword of AR,” says Alex Komoroske, director of product management at Maps. “If you get it exactly right, it’s extremely intuitive. But if we get it wrong, it is actively confusing. It’s worse than showing nothing.”

“Worse than showing nothing” is what Google Maps was accused of a decade ago in Germany, where in the aftermath of the Nazi regime, privacy-conscious Germans objected to the latest feature added to the app in the name of progress.

Of course, one reason that people object to these massive data-collection schemes is that they almost always gather more data than even their creators intend. Street View cars, for example, connected to unsecured Wi-Fi networks as they made their rounds between 2008 and 2010.

Google said it had all been a mistake and apologized, and Germany fined just shy of the maximum for a data privacy breach on that scale. Still, the case feels freshly relevant in light of the past month’s news about Clearview AI. Like Google in 2008, Clearview slurps up public data — in this case, photos of people posted publicly on the internet — to build a for-profit tool without the permission of anyone involved.

In fact, much of the news in the past week has been companies leaping up to insist that Clearview does not have permission to build its Google-for-faces tool, which the company says it sells only to law enforcement. Like other Google Maps features, it was conceived as a tool for helping people get around — not to empower the prison-industrial complex.