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The agreement prohibits customers from exporting, extracting, or scraping any Google Maps Content for use outside the Services, including bulk downloading of tiles, Street View images, geocodes, directions, distance matrix results, roads data, places data, elevation values, time zone data, business names, addresses, or user reviews.
This analysis describes what Google Maps's agreement states, permits, or reserves. It does not constitute a legal determination about enforceability. Regulatory applicability and practical outcomes may vary by jurisdiction, enforcement context, and individual circumstances. Read our methodology
This provision establishes specific operational restrictions on how Maps Content may be accessed and retained, prohibiting a wide range of data extraction and storage practices that may be common in geospatial data workflows. Violations constitute a license breach triggering immediate suspension rights under Section 5.2(d).
The updated terms establish a broader definition of activities that are subject to heightened restrictions under the Google Maps Platform Terms of Service. Previously, the definition enumerated specific high-risk categories. The revised language now encompasses any use case where service failure could reasonably be expected to result in death, serious personal injury, or severe environmental or property damage, and explicitly identifies weaponry as a restricted application. Developers and organizations using Google Maps for restricted purposes should review their use cases against the new definition to ensure continued compliance.
View change record →Under this clause, business customers are contractually prohibited from storing or republishing Google Maps data outside the Maps Platform Services, including business listings, addresses, user reviews, and mapping imagery. This restriction limits the data persistence and portability available to developers building Maps-integrated applications.
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"Customer will not export, extract, or otherwise scrape Google Maps Content for use outside the Services. For example, Customer will not: (i) pre-fetch, index, store, reshare, or rehost Google Maps Content outside the services; (ii) bulk download Google Maps tiles, Street View images, geocodes, directions, distance matrix results, roads information, places information, elevation values, and time zone details; (iii) copy and save business names, addresses, or user reviews; or (iv) use Google Maps Content with text-to-speech services.Excerpt from Google Maps's Platform Terms of Service
(1) REGULATORY LANDSCAPE: This provision is primarily a contractual IP protection mechanism for Google's database and content rights. It may engage EU Database Directive protections (Directive 96/9/EC) for EEA customers, under which substantial extraction from a protected database may be restricted regardless of contractual terms. The interaction between Google's contractual scraping prohibition and EU database rights law may require jurisdiction-specific legal evaluation. (2) GOVERNANCE EXPOSURE: Medium. The prohibition on copying and saving business names, addresses, and user reviews has direct implications for local business intelligence, competitive analysis, and data enrichment workflows that may be common in enterprise applications. Teams using Maps API data in data pipelines should audit current data retention and transformation practices against this restriction. (3) JURISDICTION FLAGS: EEA customers should assess whether the EU Database Directive creates any exceptions or modifications to this contractual restriction for legitimate research or analytical use cases. U.S. customers should note that the legal status of web scraping has been addressed in various court decisions, though contractual restrictions remain enforceable in most commercial contexts. (4) CONTRACT AND VENDOR IMPLICATIONS: Enterprise data teams and analytics vendors who receive Maps API data from customer integrations should be contractually required to comply with these restrictions. Data vendor agreements should explicitly prohibit scraping, bulk extraction, and caching of Maps Content in violation of these terms. (5) COMPLIANCE CONSIDERATIONS: Compliance teams should audit any automated data collection or ETL processes that interact with Google Maps APIs to confirm they do not perform pre-fetching, indexing, bulk downloading, or storage of Maps Content outside the Services. Review should include third-party analytics or business intelligence tools that may automatically cache API responses.
This provision establishes specific operational restrictions on how Maps Content may be accessed and retained, prohibiting a wide range of data extraction and storage practices that may be common in geospatial data workflows. Violations constitute a license breach triggering immediate suspension rights under Section 5.2(d).
Under this clause, business customers are contractually prohibited from storing or republishing Google Maps data outside the Maps Platform Services, including business listings, addresses, user reviews, and mapping imagery. This restriction limits the data persistence and portability available to developers building Maps-integrated applications.
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