2015-09-25 10:41 GMT+02:00 Purodha Blissenbach <purodha(a)blissenbach.org>rg>:
My personal issue with the tool is that it is not open
source, rather
than the possible privacy/infosec issues you
raise. But this kind of
research requires voice connection and shared schrees, and this is the
tool that is available to me for this function.
I'd like to argue that for a project which is aimed to be open and
fully
published and shared; you should not care if this qctivity is "spied" by
the NSA; at least if ou live in most countries; unless you have shared
publicly to OSM some national secret or personal information unrelatd
directly to the mapping activity in the public project.
In fact we are open to "spies" and copies or archival of our data and
public discussions by anyone :
The only concern is if you are contributing to the project using an hidden
personal identity under a pseudony, because you would not share the data if
you were contributing with your personal name, or because you don't want to
reveal your moves in your country, or associate some public interest with
your own identity (e.g. sharing some info about industrial pollution, or
LGBT activities and lobbying, or your religion, or political opinion from a
place where it is dqngerous to expose it or if you have contats or regular
trips in such country).
If you live in a country where all this activity is legal and protected by
law or constitution, and freedom of speech is not severely limited, every
activity you in OSM while respecting the controbutor terms, licences, and
reasonnable etiquette when speaking to someone else via the public
discussion channels; and don't stole data you are not permitted to copy,
you should be proud of contributing and you should never beware personnally
of spies looking at your activity. However you should just care about
protecting the common project itself in a collective sense so that what you
contribute will not cause personal problems to others (personally or
collectively); discussions channels can be used to decide collectively what
to share or not in those data to help define some common policy (which may
need to evolve over time due to possible new threats). We don't run OSM to
create new threats against people, but to help them.