[Osmf-talk] OSMF Transparency report

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 12/05/2016 11:32 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
> This sounds somehow interesting. Could you explain in short, what kind
> of cases this sentence was about? How often does this occur?

I'm referring to the "but this is a private way on my private grounds
and it is nobody's business" kind of complaint. It's totally ok for OSM
to have information about the way, and even if the grounds are closed
off it is totally possible that we have mapped something from aerial
imagery. But in most cases these are small and unimportant ways and OSM
doesn't lose much by caving in and removing something - we don't want to
be perceived as the evil invaders of privacy. I remember having once
discussed such a case with the mapper in question who consented to the
removal.

In many similar cases, we mark the ways in question as private in OSM
and explain to the complainants that this is a better method to ensure
people won't trespass on their grounds.

Only recently I had a request of someone whose telephone number was
listed in OSM and they were not happy about it. I pointed out that they
own a business and certainly the phone number was on their business
sign? They said yes but they'd like to decide in which listings they
appear. I explained to them that data protection doesn't apply here and
that we have every right to list them, and that if I removed them,
someone else might add them in quickly again, but if they really wanted
to, I *would* remove the entry. (They didn't ask for it to be removed in
the end.)

A few months ago - but this was with my FOSSGIS hat on - FOSSGIS
received an inquiry by a German data protection officer; someone had
complained about their house number in OSM. We sent a mapper around to
take a photo of the house number clearly visible from the street, and
replied with a polite explanation of what OSM is about and accompanied
that by the photo of the house number, and we haven't heard back.

> Another question in the context of takedown requests: How many of these
> come from official public entities and how many are from private
> entities (especially: have there been any from public entities, and from
> which and what).

We don't really keep track of that (whether it is a public entity that
contacts us or a private). I think we once had a complaint from a
national park administration or something like that, and various
diplomats write to us about our choice of country names etc. but these
aren't really "takedown reqests" either. Someone from the Bavarian
government contacted us recently about the apparent use of one of their
copyrighted data sources in OSM but that stepped short of a takedown
request - they just wanted to know where we had got the data from.
(Turns out the data was indeed from them and we need to redact it.)

> Does British law consent you to speak about these cases or are there
> regulations that prevent you from openly informing the members of such
> incidents (like "gag orders" in the US)?

UK law has a way to serve injunctions on someone and prevent them from
talking about it. If this were to happen to us then we'd have to comply
of course. But I don't think these would be utilised in mere copyright
cases. They are usually reserved for when someone with good friends in
government doesn't want the press to report about their sex tape or so.

> Is OSMF seeking legal advice in case such incidents occur and has it
> already happened in the past?

We haven't had anything that made us think "OMG we should seek legal
advice" but if we were at the receiving end of some large enough legal
cannon I'm quite sure we would. There's a couple of people with legal
background in LWG whom we could turn to as a first step, and there's a
lawyer in the UK who has helped us in the past on a pro-bono basis to
write our articles of association and so on, but if we were receiving
serious legal threats then we'd probably have to get serious ourselves.

But this is all highly hypothetical; as I said, there haven't been any
serious threats.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"