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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 03/01/2018 10:35 PM, Jibix wrote:
> 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.

I think you're misrepresenting it when you say "security rather than
freedom". "Accountability rather than privacy" would probably be more
correct.

> 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? 

Thing is, at OSM we depend very much on the community policing itself.
It would not be feasible to have just a small group dealing with problems.

Knowing about other edits made by the same user around the same time can
give important context to judge whether something is vandalism or an
honest mistake. If we take this information away from the community, we
lose their help in quality assurance which we desperately need.

However, I think it would be possible to limit this information to "the
OSM community" i.e. everyone who has an account, and to make these
people promise that they will not abuse the data for non-OSM purposes.

This means that I can still see what you did last summer, but I wouldn't
be allowed to use that information for non-OSM-related purposes.

This is a weak protection but I don't see how we can allow stronger
protection without employing a huge, privileged QA task force that has
access to user information and can therefore judge better.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"