[talk-au] anonymising GPX files

[John Smith]

--- On Sun, 21/6/09, Elizabeth Dodd <edodd at billiau.net> wrote:
> i finally found that dialog with a right click on the edit
> gpx layer
> but still neither of my edited tracks have been acceptable
> to osm.
> i think i'll delete the plugin.

Even when it does work, it's still more hassle than it's worth imho.

Also gpsbabel is proving to be too much of a hassle to anonymise files as well, so I've decided to bite the bullet and just code my own java or shell script to parse gpx files, strip out everything except time, lat, lon, HDOP/VDOP and elevation.

Then reset the timestamps to epoch, rather than randomising them which seems to be a bit crude and doesn't gain much.

Also I've been pondering about the time difference between GPS points and ranomising it a little to be useful if police ever started to use the information in GPX files to charge you with a speeding offense and all the hassle of taking it to court to beat it and what not.

For those of you that claim you never speed, what about those pesky school zones without flashing lights that you can't tell the times they are in force until you are virtually on top of them and have to sit and think about if the time actually applies at this point in time and slamming on your breaks if it does to prevent yourself from going in excess of the speed limit.

Even if you do reset the timestamps it may be possible for the police to find out when you went through the school zone even if the clock on your dash board says the school zone speed doesn't apply because it's inaccurately set.

Although if the GPX files are uploaded through a shared account this would reduce the risk of this sort of problem.