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Comment by ccppurcell | Hacker News Reader

If you are looking for something to channel that energy into, you could help improve open street map using streetcomplete: https://streetcomplete.app/

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I assumed that in urban USA the map would be fairly complete and opportunities for edits would be somewhat rare. My assumption was very wrong. The app showed a dozen quests just outside of my office building. Thanks for suggesting it!

There’s always things to improve or to add. Road surfaces, benches, trash bins, table tennis spots, etc. StreetComplete on Android helps make some common tasks really easy to do.

Surely military drones will use OpenStreetMap data? Even the Russians and Iranians can use it for whatever purpose they like.

Yes. Just like editing wikipedia will help train models that are used for data classification in north korea or whatever.

It's a feature of open data, it's open and usable by anyone.

... for any purpose.

With attribution

I wonder how many of these drones deliver a .txt copy of the GPL along with their payload.

Only if you publish something.

Yes. Or you can license it for specific purposes. But in general open data refers to data that is open to use by anyone, for any purpose, without restrictions except in some cases attribution.

A license only means something if you can enforce it. This means you can catch violations, and get courts to enforce it in a way that means something. If you can't catch a violation it is de facto allowed. What a license can restrict is limited by law, and so depending on the terms the court may say "you are not allowed to restrict that: they are allowed, go away". Or the court may impose a fine that is small enough everyone considers it a cost of doing business. How this plays out depends on the violation as well: if the violator can show they did their best to not violate that is very different from intentional violation. (I'm convinced the GPL will be broken - when a company shows they have lots of process to prevent the misuse, but a "rogue employee" hid their actions - the company will pay a fine but won't have to give their source code.)

Everything you do online publicly is usable in principle. Might as well also be public good. And my understanding is that Pokémon go made use of the camera. The kind of data you add using street complete is like "does this crossing have a traffic light?"

Yes, there other mobile editor that are arguably more featured (EveryDoor, OSM Go, OsmAnd), but StreetComplete has a nice gamification / simplification of UI that makes editing a breeze.

MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/

StreetComplete is a top app.

This seems like the opposite of doing anything about it. Surely military contractors would just as readily use openstreetmap data if it's of sufficient quality.

Legislation establishing consumer ownership over their data and requiring consent for novel uses seems like the obvious, existing, movement to join

See:

- [Electronic Privacy Information Center](https://epic.org/) which is doing a lot of work to keep the CFPB in check to require explicit user consent for monetizing transactions

- [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://www.eff.org/) which fights back against flawed legislation and has generally been uncompromising in their advocacy for an Opt-In Consent standard

- [Center for Democracy and Technology](https://cdt.org/) which is focused on countering algorithmic exploitation and advocating strict rules around "automated decision making tech" like opt-out rights before an AI uses their data to make decisions about their housing, credit, or employment

How can I channel my energy into preventing my data from being used for military purposes?

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a project like mapillary or streetcomplete that forbids military use.

I wish I could, but I have an iPhone.

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