[OSM-talk] Redaction of some Afghanistan data

[Paul Norman]

The Data Working Group recently had to perform a large redaction in
Afghanistan of data from two mappers who had used Google. A redaction is
where an object is removed from the current data and previous versions
are hidden in the API. They are done to hide data that cannot be shown
for copyright or other legal reasons.

There is no active local mailing list, so I'm letting talk@ know
instead. If you are in touch with local mappers, you can forward this to
them. It looks like most of the data that had to be removed was new
data, which will have been removed cleanly without needing any
additional cleanup.

If you have concerns about the source that was used for mapping
something, please contact the Data Working Group at
data at osmfoundation.org with information, including links to changesets.
It helps if you also start a changeset discussion on one of the
changesets nicely asking the mapper for more information about what they
did.

It is much better to catch this type of problem early, simplifying and
reducing the cleanup work required.

Paul Norman

For the Data Working Group