[OSM-talk] Speeding

[Robert (Jamie) Munro]

Nick Black wrote:
> Just because you're paranoid, Scott...
> 
> Indeed, this is a real concern and one that is taken seriously by the
> OSM admin.  When you upload a track, you can select "Public".  This
> allows other users to see your traces using a URL like:
> 
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/traces/user/Nickb
> 
> If you do not check the "Public" box, your traces cannot be seen to the
> public.  Traces need to be tagged with a particular user because of
> copyright issues.  A malicious individual could traces a road off google
> maps, convert it to GPX and upload it.  OSM needs a way to remove all of
> this users traces in such an event.  Individual privacy is also
> considered, which is why all data in planet.osm is anonymysed.
> 
> Am I wrong in thinking that there is a script floating around that
> fiddles with the GPX timestamps to prevent deriving speed anyway? 

It's not only speed. It's also when you were where. For example, if you
seem to often stop at a certain place late at night and leave there
early in the morning, then that's probably your home. You can probably
guess your place of work, places and friends you like to visit and lots
of other information. While it may not be useful by itself, it may only
take cross referencing it with other private information to produce lots
of data for identity theft or possibly something like blackmail.

Timestamps should not be required by the system, and if the system is
given them, it should not store them. It is too much of an invasion of
privacy. It may be useful to store timestamps to within a month to
detect if roads have been rebuilt since the trace was made, but more
accurate than that is certainly not necessary.

Robert (Jamie) Munro

Ps. related to this, it would be really useful if I could load my
private GPX files into JOSM (or something else) and delete the points
that are privacy invading, or that I know to be wrong (i.e. when the GPS
was reporting inaccurate data), then upload just what remains to OSM for
sharing. That way, future users could take my tracks into consideration
when adjusting roads to make them more accurate, or someone could write
an algorithm to report on the accuracy of roads compared to GPS in an
area or something. I'd like to be able to do it in JOSM because I'd like
to be able to compare to the map so that I know which parts of the data
are privacy invading (home, work, friends homes etc.)

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