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

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2017-05-05 12:10 GMT+02:00 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:

> How the goals of transparency and quality control in the project and the
> goal of protecting the privacy of the individual contributor can be
> reconciled is something we can, and should, think about
>


I still don't see how someone can be individually identified within OSM by
her edits, and I fail to understand how these edits are qualifying as
"personal data". Either the mapper is editing not much (so there is not
sufficient information about her, these are most mappers), or she is
editing a lot and according to his editing habits you could maybe say
something about her interests and the area where she lives, how often she
goes to other places, at what times she is active in OSM and similar. This
still won't help to identify single persons unless you have a very huge
database of many people which _already_ knows a whole lot about everyone,
including when they went abroad or in vacation, what their interests are
etc., so you won't probably gain more insight from looking at the OSM edits
as well. I also fail to understand who would attack someones privacy by
looking at OSM edits and for what scope, and why this can't be legally
excluded by stating you must not do it if you want the data (which on the
other hand will make OSM non-free data, at least with respect to data
referring to mappers).

Cheers,
Martin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20170505/a3433110/attachment-0001.html>