[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Permalinks break when user changes their display name (#482)

Andy Allan notifications at github.com
Fri Dec 8 13:46:53 UTC 2017


Anyway, I fail to see how moving away from usernames and towards account ids will have any negative consequences for GDPR. Secondly, we need to have stable links to administer the site - right now, even internal admins can have problems viewing user pages since the URLs can be changed any second. Data protection rules always have exceptions for e.g. admins dealing with administrative things. And thirdly, there will be many people (myself included) who are quite happy to publish their profiles and OSM should prioritise community members doing community building, and not prevent stuff while making hand-wavey statements about data protection.

I'm unwilling to put this on pause unless a particular GDPR problem is identified. I've spent my entire adult life dealing with statements of "You can't do that because of the Data Protection Act" when in every single case it's been totally fine. Similarly, "Heath and Safety Act" gets thrown around in vague terms too, for all kinds of reasons. I'm not happy to see "GDPR" becoming a similar catch-all.

The proposed changes do not expose any personal data, since a) account ids are not personal information anyway and b) these are already published. The proposed change does not make it any easier or harder to implement future "right to erasure" proceedures. The proposed changes make significant improvements to the ability of our moderators to manage abusive users.

My intention is to make these changes, unless someone can explain explicitly how this change would contravene the GDPR, or comes up with some non-GDPR reason to avoid doing so. If the legal situation changes in the future and we want to go back to the current situation, that's entirely possible to do too.

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