Privacy policy

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Revision as of 12:29, 11 April 2007 by Morwen (talk | contribs) (Reverted edits by ZagX52 (Talk); changed back to last version by Harry Wood)
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Copy from Wikipedia, changed to be for OSM

Change this document one section at the time, so it's easier to prevent edit conflicts when multiple people edit.

Summary

Whilst browsing the OpenStreetMap web site, normal server logging information will be collected, as with most web sites. See private logging below for more information.

If you make contributions to the OpenStreetMap project (including, but not limited to, editing maps, the wiki, or uploading GPS traces), then you are publishing these contributions publicly. You should assume that everything you contribute will be retained forever. Some limited exceptions are detailed below.

Publishing on the wiki and public data

Simply visiting the web site does not expose your identity publicly (but see private logging below).

When you edit anything in the wiki or any of the maps, you are publishing a document. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly with that edit as its author.

Identification of an author

You must be logged in to publish or edit a page in the wiki, or to edit map data.

As you are logged in, you will be identified by your user name. This can be your real name, or you may choose to publish under a pseudonym. You make this choice when you create your account.

This is correct for the Wiki, but not for the map: map usernames at present have to be valid e-mail addresses. Will that change in the near future?

It may be possible for a motivated individual to connect your user name with your real-life identity. Therefore if you are very concerned about privacy, you may prefer to use a pseudonym.

Whatever form of name you use, your IP address will be logged whenever you access the OpenStreetmap site.

Your IP address will not be available to the public except in cases of abuse, including vandalism of a OpenStreetMap data by you or by another user with the same IP address. In all cases, your IP address will be stored on the servers and can be seen by Openstreetmap's server administrators and by users who have been granted "CheckUser" access. Your IP address, and its connection to any usernames that share it may be released under certain circumstances (see below).

It is important to log out of the OpenStreetmap site after each session if you are using a shared computer, to prevent other people from using your identity.

Cookies

The wiki will set a temporary session cookie (PHPSESSID) whenever you visit the site. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. It will be deleted when you close your browser session.

More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or optionally password) on your next visit. These last up to 30 days. You should clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don't wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)

Passwords

Many aspects of the OpenStreetMap projects' community interactions depend on the reputation and respect that is built up through a history of valued contributions. User passwords are the only guarantee of the integrity of a user's edit history. All users are encouraged to select strong passwords and to never share them. No one shall knowingly expose the password of another user to public release either directly or indirectly.

Private logging

Every time you visit a web page, you send a lot of information to the web server. Most web servers routinely maintain access logs with a portion of this information, which can be used to get an overall picture of what pages are popular, what other sites link to this one, and what web browsers people are using. It is not the intention of the OpenStreetMap projects to use this information to keep track of legitimate users.

These logs are used to produce the statistics pages; the raw log data is not made public, and is normally discarded after about two weeks.

Here's a sample of what's logged for one page view:

64.164.82.142 - - [21/Oct/2003:02:03:19 +0000]
"GET /wiki/draft_privacy_policy HTTP/1.1" 200 18084
"http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OpenStreetMap:Community_Portal"
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5"

Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems and in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site. IP addresses of users, derived either from those logs or from records in the database are frequently used to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of the wiki, including the suspected use of malicious "sockpuppets" (duplicate accounts), vandalism, harassment of other users, or disruption of the wiki.

Policy on release of data derived from page logs

It is the policy of OpenStreetMap that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature, may be released by the system administrators or users with CheckUser access, in the following situations:

  1. In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
  2. With permission of the affected user
  3. To the chair of OpenStreetMap, his legal counsel, or his designee, when necessary for investigation of abuse complaints.
  4. Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
  5. Where the user has been vandalising articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers
  6. Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of OpenStreetMap, its users or the public.

OpenStreetMap policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.

Sharing information with third parties

Except where otherwise specified, all text, mapping data and annotations added to OpenStreetMap is available for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

OpenStreetMap will not sell or share private information, such as email addresses, with third parties, unless you agree to release this information, or it is required by law to release the information.

Security of information

OpenStreetMap makes no guarantee against unauthorized access to any information you provide. This information may be available to anyone with access to the servers.

E-mail, mailing lists and IRC

E-mail

You may provide your e-mail address in your Preferences and enable other logged-in users to send email to you through the wiki. Your address will not be revealed to them unless you respond, or possibly if the email bounces. The email address may be used by OpenStreetMap to communicate with users on a wider scale.

If you do not provide an email address, you will not be able to reset your password if you forget it. However, you may contact one of the OpenStreetMap server administrators to enter a new mail address in your preferences.

You can remove your email address from your preferences at any time to prevent it being used.

Mailing lists

If you subscribe to one of the project mailing lists, your address will be exposed to any other subscriber. The list archives of most of OpenStreetMap's mailing lists are public, and your address may find itself quoted in messages. The list archives are also archived by Gmane and other services. Mails are usually not deleted or modified, but it may be done in extreme cases.

IRC

IRC channels are not officially part of OpenStreetMap proper. By participating in an IRC channel, your IP address may be exposed to other participants. Different channels have different policies on whether logs may be published.

User data

Data on users, such as the times at which they edited and the number of edits they have made are publicly available via "user contributions" lists, and in aggregated forms published by other users.

Removal of user accounts

Once created, user accounts will not be removed. It may be possible for a username to be changed (depending on the policies of your local wiki and on the number of edits you have). OpenStreetMap does not guarantee that a name will be changed on request.

Whether specific user information is deleted is dependant on the deletion policies of the project that contains the information.

Deletion of content

Removing text from the OpenStreetMap wiki does not permanently delete it. In normal articles, anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. If an article is "deleted", any user with "administrator" access on the wiki, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted. Information can be permanently deleted by those people with access to the servers, but there is no guarantee this will happen except in response to legal action.

Other sites may keep archive copies of information published on the OpenStreetmap site. These sites are not under the control of OpenStreetmap. You should assume that any information placed on the OpenStreetmap site will raplidly become part of the permanent public record.