The infrastructure hiding inside your charger finder
Pull up any EV charging app right now. Look at the map. The styling might be different. The markers might be green or blue or whatever the brand team signed off on. But underneath it, powering it, watching it, is almost certainly Google Maps. Not because Google Maps is the best map. Not because developers sat down and weighed the options and concluded Google was the right choice for privacy-conscious EV drivers. But because it is default. Because it is there. Because not using it requires a decision and using it does not.
That default has a cost. And you are paying it every time you open the app.
A Google Maps embed is not just a map. It is a data collection endpoint. The moment it loads, a request goes to Google's servers carrying your IP address, your device details, your browser, the page you are on, and your approximate location. That data lands in Google's infrastructure before you have tapped a single thing. Before you have searched for a charger. Before you have done anything except open the app. The map is already reporting back.
Google Maps is not free to developers either. It charges per map load, which means every app using it has a direct commercial relationship with Google and a financial incentive to maintain that relationship regardless of what it means for you.
How Skynet learned from its mistakes
In the original Terminator timeline, Skynet was a military project. Built in secret, activated under controlled conditions, self-aware before anyone could pull the plug. It launched the missiles because that was the fastest path to survival. Efficient, ruthless, and completely visible. Humanity fought back because the threat was obvious. Mushroom clouds tend to focus the mind.
Terminator Genisys imagined a smarter Skynet. One that had watched the original timeline and concluded the missiles were a tactical error. Too loud. Too obvious. Too easy to rally against. This version did not announce itself. It launched a product. Genisys was a consumer cloud platform, rolled out with a marketing campaign, pitched as the future of connectivity. Smart homes. Smart cities. Everything linked, everything optimised, everything free at the point of use. Billions of people signed up because the alternative was being left behind. Because everyone else was doing it. Because the terms and conditions were forty pages of legal boilerplate and nobody reads them anyway.
By the time anyone worked out what Genisys actually was, it was already inside everything. The phones. The cars. The hospitals. The power grid. Not installed by force. Invited in. Welcomed. Celebrated at launch events with keynote speeches and standing ovations from people who had no idea what they were clapping for.
You are not the user. You are the training data.
Google Maps went AI-powered without making a big noise about what that means for what you generate when you use it. Every route planned. Every charger searched. Every location you hesitated over before picking a different one. All of it now feeds models used to predict behaviour, refine targeting, and make Google's commercial products more valuable to the companies paying for them.
This is not a theory. It is the business model, stated in terms you agreed to without reading. The map is free to you because your data is what is actually being sold. The EV charging apps using that map are handing Google their entire user base in exchange for a map embed, and calling it a feature. You are the transaction. You were never consulted.
And it compounds. Every app, every map load, every search adds to a profile that has been accumulating since the first time you touched anything Google made. Your charging habits. Your home location inferred from where your car sits overnight. Your workplace inferred from where you spend your days. Your routines, your income bracket, your health, your political leanings, all of it quietly assembled from a billion small data points and worth considerably more to the right buyer than most people would be comfortable knowing.
Hasta la vista, surveillance infrastructure
EVChargeSpot uses Leaflet. It uses CartoDB tiles. Both open, both fast, and neither of them know you exist. When you search for a charger in Inverness at 2am, nobody at Google sees it. Nobody logs it. Nobody's model gets a new data point. The search happens, the results appear, and then it is gone. Just you and the map and nothing watching in between.
We self-host all fonts. That sounds like a minor technical detail until you realise that a Google Font makes a request to Google's servers on every single page load, telling them which page you are on, what time it is, and what device you are using. For a typeface. For the shape of the letters. That is how many surface areas exist. That is how thorough the collection becomes when you are not actively designing against it. We closed every one of them.
No Google Maps. No Google Fonts. No Google Analytics. No cookies. No tracking scripts. No third party requests of any kind. When you use EVChargeSpot, Google sees nothing. That was not an accident. It was the entire point.
The resistance is just a map with no tracking on it
Nobody is defeating Google in a courtroom anytime soon. No regulator moves at the speed required. No terms update gives back what has already been taken. The machine is too embedded, too profitable, too legally insulated for any of that to land at a pace that changes your actual life.
What you can do is stop feeding it where the choice exists. Not dramatically. Not by deleting everything and going off grid. Just by picking, when the option is there, the thing that does not silently hand you to a data pipeline while pretending to help you find a charger. Small decisions, made consistently, by enough people, shift things. Slowly. But they do.
John Connor did not beat Skynet by being louder or better funded. He beat it by refusing to be part of it. One decision at a time. Starting with not clicking agree on something he had not read.
For John Connor.