[OSM-talk] Maintaining privacy as a casual mapper

[Blake Girardot]

Hi Philippe,

The number one thing you should do is make sure your username here on
OSM is not in any way related to any other name or nick name you use
in other places.

I am well aware that the lifetime pattern of my mapping, tied to my
public information is essentially a map to the places I live, work and
recreate.

I am not happy about it and I could get my osm username changed, but
that is not really adequate as anyone who has a record of my username
and osm userid number over the past 10 years, can still select all of
my edits. But in the long run, it is still worth it to me to
contribute data to OSM, as I have gotten a lot out of OSM and other
open data and software projects. I also estimate my risk as pretty low
anyway.

If you have a username that is tied to a public or other used name of
some sort, my advice is to ask the user name to be changed. Then never
use that account again, and get one that is from the start totally
anonymous. If you do not mind using your existing gmail account,
assuming you signed up using one, use the gmail "+something" (the
actual plus symbol goes in) email address feature so you can sign up
for a new OSM account. Google for how to do that "gmail + email
addresses" or something should

I strongly feel that no matter what you do in OSM, you eventually make
a map to your locations in the physical world.

I advise people, especially people in groups at greater risk for
harassing or stalking, never use an osm username related to any other
name or other identifying information you have ever used.

Cheers, and thank you for mapping!

Blake


On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 5:47 AM Philippe Latulippe
<philippe.latulippe at gmail.com> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk



-- 
----------------------------------------------------
Blake Girardot
"When I checked the My edits are Public Domain box, I meant it and I still do."
OSM Wiki - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Bgirardot
HOTOSM Member - https://hotosm.org/users/blake_girardot