[OSM-talk] Maintaining privacy as a casual mapper

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

Am Mo., 4. Nov. 2019 um 12:20 Uhr schrieb Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch>:

> https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use#II._Privacy requires
> you to keep your contact information (which is currently your e-mail
> address) current. This is not really new as it was implied by doing away
> with anonymous edits in 2007.
>


actually only signups as anonymous users were abolished in 2007, who
already had such an account could use it for a significant time after that
date (IIRR until 2012 license change).



> Further items like my location and a profile description are optional.
> >
> To be clear certain risk reduction measures are completely OK and we
> outline these in the privacy policy, what is not OK is anything that
> amounts to de facto making the edits anonymous to the OSMF.



the only item that must be effectively kept current is the email "contact
information" (the other information like username is of your choosing,
provided it doesn't insult others / is not unlawful according to the UK law
or your local law etc.). This is the term that is used, and it is clear
that mappers being reachable/contactable is in the best interest of the
project. Still, it doesn't say it must be your personal email address, just
that you should be reachable through it, and that it is the "e-mail address
associated with your account". It must not necessarily be "your e-mail
address".

FWIW, with so-called "throw-away" e-mail addresses you could still remain
contacted, if the people did not actually "throw away" the address but
checked it frequently (which of course would make the whole exercise pretty
pointless).

Anyway, for good anonymity you should never use the same account for more
than one edit, and this would lead to a lot of "contributor signup noise"
even if only a small part of our active contributors actually did it. So
while it may not be forbidden by the current term, I would not suggest to
everybody to act in a way which tries to hide the traces pointing to the
author.

Cheers
Martin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20191104/f375dcd0/attachment-0001.html>