[OSM-talk] relating trace points to gpx files

[Barnett, Phillip]

I'm still not sure what is meant by the 'privacy issue' with respect to
uploaded gpx logs. Can someone enlighten me with a theoretical situation
which might have negative consequences for a user?

Someone a few days ago suggested that logs which showed someone
exceeding the speed limit might be self incriminating. Leaving aside the
sheer improbability of the traffic police being a) able to and
b)motivated to trawl raw submitted tracklogs, and match them up to
actual sections of road with known speed limits, and then given the fact
that the usernames are anonymous, and can only be tied down to real
email addreses (and thus people) by compromising the central server
system - even then, GPX tracklogs are XML files, which are trivially
editable, and so could not be admitted as evidence in any reasonable
court of law (for instance, computer records are not admissable as
evidence in an English court of law unless certified by a responsible
person as an authoritative record, of say, failure to pay Council Tax)

Any other compromises of a persons privacy are again obfuscated by the
anonymous nickname that is the only publicly visible identifier, and in
any case, I'm having a hard time thinking of any scenario in which
someone's privacy might be compromised adversely (except perhaps a
murderer who has a side interest in contributing to a FOSS project, and
inadvertently uploads a tracklog which destroys his alibi, which is
picked up by an incredibly savvy police IT squad ...)

Am I alone in thinking that privacy issues are a little overstated here?
I am a big advocate of personal privacy but given that the data has been
anonymised by self selected nicknames, I don't see a problem. And I'm
perfectly happy to continue uploading publicly viewable tracks,
providing at least that my real email address isn't public.

Phillip

-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org
[mailto:talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of Erik Johansson
Sent: 12 July 2006 09:58
To: Talk Openstreetmap
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] relating trace points to gpx files

On 7/12/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Etienne wrote:
>
> > For privacy reasons, once tracklogs have been uploaded to the server

> > it is not possible to tell which points come from which log file,
>
> This mantra is being repeated so often, that it is almost becoming a 
> truth.

It's a mantra that is untrue in a technical meaning  as well, according
to the Mysql schema in svn it's quite possible to see what points belong
to what GPX file. There just isn't any GUI for that, which might be
because of misaligned privacy concerns.

A far as I know (from reading the code)  when you delete a GPX file, the
points will be marked invisible. So they will disappear from the
rendered images.

There is a big difference though in political views on privacy and the
technical implementation. Just because there are some hardcore view on
not giving out any data, doesn't mean that data isn't logged stored and
archived.

/erik

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