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

[Christoph Hormann]

On Sunday 07 May 2017, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> It is a common issue in OSM (and elsewhere) for people to use the
> status quo as a reason. "Admin boundaries are not visible on the
> ground and they are mapped, THEREFORE I can also map everything else
> that is not visible on the ground" - no! And you're doing it the
> other way round, saying "your privacy goes down the drain if you do
> anything online anyway, so why should we at OSM take steps to protect
> it more".

But we also should be careful not to apply the 'analogy sledgehammer' 
the other way round - just because restricting access to data can in 
some case reduce privacy issues it is not necessarily always the best 
way to deal with such a problem.

Specifically that putting a login via OSM account in front of HDYC makes 
sense for this specific tool and some specific concerns regarding it 
(mainly the 'invitation to stalking' matter) should not lead anyone to 
consider this a useful standard measure for all privacy related 
concerns.  

Side note: Mailing lists are a very different matter for a variety of 
technical and social reasons.  I would say that the idea of restricting 
mailing list archive access due to metadata based privacy concerns is 
fairly far fetched (in contrast to content related concerns about 
privacy or confidentiality - which make much more sense) considering 
the archives show almost nothing of the mail metadata except 'From' 
and 'Date' which can be freely chosen by the user.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/