[OSM-talk] HDYC, login requirement and "privacy"

Michał Brzozowski www.haxor at gmail.com
Thu May 4 22:39:27 UTC 2017


On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 11:33 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> I have personally talked to people who said they don't want to
> contribute to OSM because Pascal Neis' page was "inviting stalkers".
>
> Those people were not the geek elite who have made it a habit to
> thoroughly think about what gets published and how to ensure that
> there's no link between their online identity and their private live if
> they don't want their privacy violated. Those were people from groups
> currently underrepresented in OSM, people whom we would like to see more
> of in OSM, but who felt unsafe making themselves visible like that.


How many people? I think we would make it worse for many just to have
a handful of people happy. I don't think we should strive to catch
mappers at any cost. I know the intentions are good, but reality has
often taught me otherwise.

Many national communities use their own change monitoring tools that
will break, for instance greeting and monitoring new mappers. We use
one site in Poland and the Dutch community also uses another site.
There's also Overpass API.
This is not feasible on a technical level IMO and would require
significant effort to satisfy just these paranoid people. I don't
trust OSMF to accommodate everyone's needs on change monitoring.

Also, I see no reasonable way that upcoming EU privacy rules would
affect us. Would they consider OSM as a special case or what?
Everything mappers do, as has been said, is consensual and explicit.

When I said spirit, I though for instance mapping parties which were
once very popular and still somewhat are. It was customary to make
animated progress maps colored by user.

Long story short: weigh "benefits" to all the far-reaching implications.

I really hope this won't come through. Really.

Michał



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