[OSM-talk] Use of "Proprietary" imagery to edit OSM

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 07:11 2022-10-30, Greg Troxel đã viết:
> But then the company doing the editing should document which company's
> imagery and which revision year they are using.   Things should be as
> transparent as possible, and this doesn't feel that way.

There was a recent subthread on this issue on the tagging mailing list 
too. I recently asked Lyft about the vintage and they said the 
street-level imagery they map from is mostly less than six months old, 
which editor-layer-index can't compete with. They expressed openness to 
sharing more details whenever there's a debate about something specific. 
I'll link the start of the mailing list discussion here so I don't have 
to repeat myself. ;-)

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2022-October/066080.html

For what it's worth, the argument about transparency would probably be 
more effective if it were actually an upfront expectation that applies 
to everyone. As it is, anyone could simply set source=survey or 
local_knowledge on their changeset and call it a day.

Unless I take the time to take more polished photos along my daily walk 
and upload them to Wikimedia Commons or Flickr with the correct 
metadata, my photos are copyrighted, all rights reserved, as unpublished 
works. The same goes with my field notes, which I've long deleted as 
soon as I finish mapping, never to be recovered by a fact-checker. 
Sometimes I'm left wondering if I made a typo until I return to the spot.

We could ask if the honor code should apply to such a prolific editing 
team. But do we actually have a problem with Lyft fabricating edits? I 
haven't seen evidence of that; it would be quite surprising for a 
company so invested in our project.

(Meanwhile, the U.S. community has had to spend quite a bit of energy 
following up on mappers who profit from mapping on NFT-based games, some 
of whom copy from Google Maps but lie about local knowledge.)

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us