Hello everyone,
I've been a contributor of OpenStreetMap for a few year, with a couple of
different accounts. I got them deleted today and I though it could be
worthwhile talking about this here.
In our current era of big data, I have been more and more concerned about
having all my osm edits publicly linked to my profiles, and these profiles
publicly listing all these positions and places where I've been, also with
somehow time information and sometimes comments, etc... visible forever by
anyone, or any bot. I've looked into making the link between all that data not
publicly visible, but it seems the functionality there use to be for that
(anonymous editing) is not possible since 2007/2009.
I've read (a good few of the) related e-mails from that time [1], and I
understand that there was an important ground and a general consensus for that
decision, despite a minority of voice disappointed by this "security rather
than freedom" direction being taken.
My humble point of view is that with the important evolution that OSM has
experienced since back then, it would be a very good thing, if not done
already, to revisit this issue and find a middle point which possibly was not
easily feasible at the time but would now be more achievable. For instance, if
I had a tick box "do not publicly link changes to my account", either at
account level or at changeset level, but that every user still had the
possibility to send a message to the author of such edits, and to roll them
back (even potentially with a procedure for banning users with too much
anonymous changes rolled back by the community, as the edits-author link is not
lost, it's just not visible to users, whether registered or not). Then, I
think, everyone would be happy, or close to? I mean, I think this would address
both the concerns that led to the decision of disabling anonymous editing back
in 2007 and the privacy concerns I summarised above.
(At the time it was also mentioned that OSM is all about being a community
project, and that it was probably inconsistent to allow anonymous contributions
in that context. In particular, a comparison with Wikipedia was made. My
opinion on this is that location-related information are in general much more
privacy-critical than Wikipedia edits are, in particular now that you have
user-friendly mobile apps for mapping on the go, and therefore the comparison
is inappropriate.)
I've been looking a bit around to see if there was a plan for developing
something like that anytime soon, or if it had been implemented already, but I
couldn't find. I've mailed the support team, who confirmed there is currently
no way (other than closing an account) to make edits become anonymous.
Therefore I'm afraid the only way forward I see to address my concerns is the
following:
1) on the one hand having my past accounts deleted, for the corresponding
change-sets not to be linked any more to my name or pseudonym. I got that done
today.
2) on the other hand, from now on, to periodically create and abandon accounts
for keeping editing without a massive correlation of data being too easily
possible (but even like that it's an unperfect tradeoff).
I'm not sure how much of the community is having concerns similar to mine, but
I would guess that these can only have gone bigger and bigger since back in
2007. As said above, I believe it would be worth having a think about it again.
(But maybe it has already been discussed again recently, and I didn't find out?)
What are your thoughts?
Looking forward,
Jibix
[1]:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2007-October/thread.html#18853
--
Jibix
favourite webpage of the moment:
https://degooglisons-internet.org/alternatives?l=en
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