I have realized people map what is important to them in higher quantities than other things. Thus you find the areas they have mapped over the areas they don’t map. People map the areas the know more about than the areas they don’t, thus looking at edit clusters can show where people live. Finally the tag local knowledge as a source shows where someone has been. Combining these all together can be used to track people down.
Discussion
Cummentu di Obum lu 23 March 2020 ê 07:15
very salient point. absolutely try in every word…
Cummentu di SimonPoole lu 23 March 2020 ê 08:28
The OSMFToU specifically disallow that, if you have concrete evidence of this happening, please contact us at privacy@osmfoundation.org
Cummentu di PhysicsArmature lu 23 March 2020 ê 08:40
No evidence, just preemptive worry.
Cummentu di philippec lu 23 March 2020 ê 09:22
It is better that people map the area they know. I have bad experiences with foreigners.
Cummentu di LCeT lu 23 March 2020 ê 21:42
Totally correct, and the nice thing is OSM doesn’t enforce a real-name policy and has a tolerance for multi-accounts: osm.wiki/OpenStreetMap_account#Account_Names_and_Multi_Account_Policies
Cummentu di PhysicsArmature lu 24 March 2020 ê 05:54
@LCeT, just me being great at worrying.
Cummentu di BCNorwich lu 24 March 2020 ê 14:54
I usually cut out the pieces of a GPS trace around my home before uploading it. Thus folk can only roughly know where I am which I don’t mind.
Cummentu di amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 lu 24 March 2020 ê 16:33
Geofabrik provides regional extracts of OSM data. If you aren’t logged into OSM, you can only get versions without metadata like usernames.