[OSM-talk] Maintaining privacy as a casual mapper

Oleksiy Muzalyev oleksiy.muzalyev at bluewin.ch
Sun Nov 3 15:55:43 UTC 2019


You can assist from time to time in mapping the areas were there is one 
or another trouble, like a military conflict, or a natural or 
technogenic disaster. The list can be found here: 
https://tasks.hotosm.org/contribute?difficulty=ALL

This way it would be not easy to figure out in which place you live.

Frankly, I do not like an idea of creating the multiple "ghost" 
accounts. These databases are maintained by volunteers, often on 
shoestring budget. If everyone from a million mappers will create 
several accounts than the database's table will have not a million rows, 
what is already quite a lot, but several millions. The superfluous data 
on the hard disks means also additional electrical energy.

Best regards,
Oleksiy (Alex-7 at OSM)

On 11/3/19 11:42, Philippe Latulippe wrote:
> Hello everyone!
>
> I like to improve OSM casually, making small fixes as I use the map in
> my day-to-day life. However, doing so without any precautions would
> reveal a great deal of information about where I've been, since my
> edits cover exactly the places where I'm active. A look at my edit
> history would reveal where I live, where I work, where I've traveled.
> If last night I had added a detailed POI of a restaurant and nothing
> else, one could correctly assume that I was at that restaurant
> recently.
>
> I've managed to protect my privacy somewhat by creating one account
> for every neighbourhood I want to map. This is time consuming and
> error prone, and it's held me back from making improvements to the
> map.
>
> Are there better ways to maintain some privacy while editing the map?
> Are there some tools? Or is there a way to make edits in a way that
> doesn't reveal my username to regular users?
>
> Philippe
>
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