[OSM-talk] Privacy concerns - revive some sort of anonymous editing?

[Jibix]

Hello everyone,
I've been a contributor of OpenStreetMap for a few year, with a couple of different accounts. I got them deleted today and I though it could be worthwhile talking about this here.

In our current era of big data, I have been more and more concerned about having all my osm edits publicly linked to my profiles, and these profiles publicly listing all these positions and places where I've been, also with somehow time information and sometimes comments, etc... visible forever by anyone, or any bot. I've looked into making the link between all that data not publicly visible, but it seems the functionality there use to be for that (anonymous editing) is not possible since 2007/2009.

I've read (a good few of the) related e-mails from that time [1], and I understand that there was an important ground and a general consensus for that decision, despite a minority of voice disappointed by this "security rather than freedom" direction being taken.

My humble point of view is that with the important evolution that OSM has experienced since back then, it would be a very good thing, if not done already, to revisit this issue and find a middle point which possibly was not easily feasible at the time but would now be more achievable. For instance, if I had a tick box "do not publicly link changes to my account", either at account level or at changeset level, but that every user still had the possibility to send a message to the author of such edits, and to roll them back (even potentially with a procedure for banning users with too much anonymous changes rolled back by the community, as the edits-author link is not lost, it's just not visible to users, whether registered or not). Then, I think, everyone would be happy, or close to? I mean, I think this would address both the concerns that led to the decision of disabling anonymous editing back in 2007 and the privacy concerns I summarised above.

(At the time it was also mentioned that OSM is all about being a community project, and that it was probably inconsistent to allow anonymous contributions in that context. In particular, a comparison with Wikipedia was made. My opinion on this is that location-related information are in general much more privacy-critical than Wikipedia edits are, in particular now that you have user-friendly mobile apps for mapping on the go, and therefore the comparison is inappropriate.)

I've been looking a bit around to see if there was a plan for developing something like that anytime soon, or if it had been implemented already, but I couldn't find. I've mailed the support team, who confirmed there is currently no way (other than closing an account) to make edits become anonymous.

Therefore I'm afraid the only way forward I see to address my concerns is the following:
1) on the one hand having my past accounts deleted, for the corresponding change-sets not to be linked any more to my name or pseudonym. I got that done today.
2) on the other hand, from now on, to periodically create and abandon accounts for keeping editing without a massive correlation of data being too easily possible (but even like that it's an unperfect tradeoff).

I'm not sure how much of the community is having concerns similar to mine, but I would guess that these can only have gone bigger and bigger since back in 2007. As said above, I believe it would be worth having a think about it again. (But maybe it has already been discussed again recently, and I didn't find out?)

What are your thoughts?

Looking forward,

Jibix

[1]: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2007-October/thread.html#18853

--
Jibix
favourite webpage of the moment: https://degooglisons-internet.org/alternatives?l=en
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