[OSM-talk] Anonymous login, yet again- was privacy policy

David Groom reviews at pacific-rim.net
Fri Jul 28 00:47:07 BST 2006


I think we are going to have to accept there is no absolute answer to the 
question of anonymous login.  But here are my thoughts for what its worth.

1)  I can see no real downside to anonymous access to "read" OSM data.

2) OSM data is not like words written on Wikipedia, so don't cite that as an 
example of how to proceed.  To explain:

a) as Martyn Welch (and others) have said its far easier to spot an error on 
Wikipedia than it will be on OSM data;

b) I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories, but I have to accept the 
possibility.  Something written in Wikipedia is in general not likely to 
cause commercial harm to anyone, and therefore:

i) wikipedia "data" is unlikely to be corrupted simply to cause a commercial 
disadvantage to someone;
ii) if something on wikipedia does come from a copyrighted source it is 
unlikely to cause financial loss to someone;

However, at least in the United Kingdom, the data being produced by the OSM 
project directly effects the revenue earning potential of a number of large 
powerful organisations which therefore have a distinct reason to note any 
breaches of copyright, and take appropriate action.

For these reasons OSM has to be more careful than Wikipedia in identifying 
the identity of contributors, and separating one contributor from another 
( i.e. no anonymous write access) so that problem data can more easily be 
removed.

c) OSM data is more "viral". Suppose someone writes something on wikipedia 
that is wrong, it can be removed and this doesn't really effect the rest of 
the article.  However suppose someone (logged in as anonymous) puts in a few 
nodes that are derived from a copyright source, then someone goes and uses 
those  nodes to form a segment, and then someone else uses that segment to 
form a way.  In deleting those nodes we then have to delete someone else's 
work who created the segments and the way.  Not only that, but we then have 
to back out all data created by that anonymous source, even if it doesn't 
belong to the corrupt nodes.

d) having said all the above, I can see the argument for the fact that if 
someone is looking at OSM maps and sees a name of a street is missing, or 
spelt wrong, that they should be able to easily correct this.  Such a 
correction would not be "viral" in the case of (c) above as it only affects 
the key/value of an existing entry.

To summarise:

A) Read access could be anonymous
B) Uploading of gpx tracks, creation of ways, & segments MUST require an OSM 
user account
C) I personally don't like the idea, but, adding key / values to EXISTING 
ways might be allowed by anonymous login.

David










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