[OSM-talk] Re: privacy policy

[Martyn Welch]

Hi

On Thursday 27 July 2006 13:11, Immanuel Scholz wrote:
> Other than wikipedia, OSM does not allow the edit without a login
> (anonymous).
>
> I like to have the possibility to edit data without to have to create an
> account first. I don't care whether the IP address is used in this case
> (as wikipedia does) or not.

I *really* don't think that this is a good idea and am supprised that it works 
so well for wikipedia.

The problem as I see it is:

1) Literal copying of works into wikipedia is easier for the average person to 
spot than it will be in OSM. Two passages of text or images can be easily 
compared, exact copies will be easy to spot. How do you do this with 
something such as OSM? All the information between maps *should* match. 
Unless you can physically visit a location, how are you going to determine 
what discrepancies are errors, copies of easter eggs copied from a map or new 
roads?

2) If the data is eventually to be used for purposes such as route planning, 
OSM is going to contain a lot of meta-data that will be hard to visualise and 
which will alter the performance of the route planning software. As a result 
I think that OSM is somewhere between wikipedia and a software project, thus 
not everything that works for wikipedia will work for OSM. I feel that open 
commit access is one of these.

3) Allowing anonymous commit access removes accountability. Removing 
accountability will decrease the trust-worthiness of the data. No one should 
use wikipedia as an authoritative source of information, instead they should 
use it as a point of reference from which further research on a topic should 
be carried out and the information verified. Using this model on OSM would 
imply that any map produced by OSM should not be taken as authoritative and 
should be verified by looking at other maps, etc. This greatly reduces the 
worth of OSM.

4) It's not hard to create an account. It doesn't require a lot of 
information. If you really want to hide away from accountability then setup 
an anonymous email address using something like mixmaster.

There's 4 reasons why I feel having anonymous commit access would be bad. I 
would be in favour of anonymous *read*, but I feel that is a separate issue. 
Can you provide more reasons as to why anonymous write access would be good?

Martyn

-- 

Martyn Welch (martyn at welchs.me.uk)

PGP Key : http://www.welchs.me.uk/martyn/pgpkey/
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