[Tagging] Amenity swimming_pool (was Amenity parking)

[John Sturdy]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 7:38 PM, Jo <winfixit at gmail.com> wrote:
> On the one hand I wouldn't bother tagging them, but for the ones that you
> did tag, I think you should go back and tag them private. The tennis courts
> too.

Agreed --- I'll do that (although fairly gradually).

> Every time I see solar panels shining on Bing, my fingers itch to tag them
> as power plants, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense to do so... It's
> borderline privacy transgression, isn't it?

Again, agreed.  I wasn't sure whether to tag pools at first, but
they're even more obvious than houses (on Bing etc) and if we count it
as privacy transgression, perhaps we should count the exact size and
shape of a house as a similar transgression, and simply map all houses
as single points (so that likely affluence can't be inferred from the
house size, as well as it not being inferred from presence or absence
of swimming pool or tennis court in the garden).

Also, if eventually such features are mapped consistently all over the
place (country / world) it could be useful for those calculating
social statistics (human geography) which I see as a use for
OSM-as-database (e.g. quality-of-life by county, etc).

I just hope such data doesn't get used for directed marketing; but if
it does, the marketing industry is probably going to come up with the
data anyway before long (I don't think it would be difficult for a
swimming pool accessories company to get software written for spotting
swimming pools on Bing / Google Maps, correlating it with address data
(perhaps by outsourcing to a country with cheap labour -- or perhaps
the pool-spotting could be done that way anyway), and mailshot all
pool owners) so not mapping such features isn't really going to
protect privacy that much.

__John