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

[Greg Morgan]

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 2:35 PM, Jibix <jibix at protonmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
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).
>

If you did not know, not only is there a user name/pseudonym/profile name
but it is linked to an internal number.  The internal number is just a
sequence number that really holds the database together.  More than likely,
the account deletion was nothing more than changing your username.

Start with a fresh account.  Pick some name that you would never user or
take the internal number and add user_ in front of the number.  Then tell
no one what you have done.  Map away.  Map in another area of the world so
that no one can make a relationship between the old you and the new you.
The database needs that internal number to keep the nodes, ways, and
relations glued together.  Otherwise, I think all your plans will not
provide you the privacy that you think that they will.

Regards,
Greg
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