Comment by wisty

Yes. The US did this with GPS - co-ordinates would be slightly scrambled, unless you had a military decoder.

Some people worked around it by getting the GPS location at a fixed point (i.e. a lighthouse) then figuring out the offset for the area.

The reason being, maps and location data has military uses.

You'll also find it's illegal to make maps of certain infrastructure (generators, power lines, dams) in many countries.