[OSM-talk] Maintaining privacy as a casual mapper

Warin 61sundowner at gmail.com
Tue Nov 5 23:20:14 UTC 2019


On 03/11/19 21:42, 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?
>

You can use multiple accounts. Each one may indicate a certain area, unless you map extensively.
Most mappers 'names' get associated with some area and probably some habits.

Eventually your local area will be well mapped ... and so you may 'run out of things to do'.

Note: This will not stop some mapper editing your entries to comply with their scheme.
They can simply look for things that don't comply with their scheme and alter those, no matter how many different names that have entered those.






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