Our home’s previous owners’ rental tenant created an account on OSM here, and made an edit to our private driveway a year after we bought the house and they had been evicted. After a nightmare trying to source the origin of the map/driving direction errors with GIS personnel help, we finally found this site was what was feeding those maps false data. I have corrected it but is there a way to prevent that user from repeating this? Will they be the one who is able to approve or disapprove my edit?
no
no
vast majority of residential building, their addresses, driveways etc was added by people other than their owners
if someone would readd the same bad data again, feel free to contact DWG - Data Working Group - OpenStreetMap Wiki
they are dealing with persistent vandalism etc in OSM
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In answer to the question in your post title: Generally no.
If you think someone is adding bad data maliciously you can report them to the DWG, but it’s generally better to contact them first and ask why they made the change in case it was an honest mistake.
In general OpenStreetMap favours what’s on the ground rather than what’s official. If for example someone has put up a sign with a road name on it then that’s generally taken as ground truth whether or not it followed whatever the local bureaucratic process happens to be. OpenStreetMap data is generally contributed by hobbyist in their free time not public servants working in an official capacity.
The way you appear to be referring to was added in 2007 and seems to have been part of the TIGER import.[1] When it was initially imported it appears to have been marked as a residential road but this was corrected to a service road back in 2015 long before the name appeared.
The person who added the name listed “in-person viewing, posted, USPS” as their source for it and described the change as “Update driveway name” which is generally consistent with the tagging it already had.
This import is well known to have data quality issues, but was one of very few suitably licensed choices for a US-wide starting point to save everything from having to be mapped from scratch as it had to be in much of the rest of the world. ↩︎
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… and quite often the owners are not the best source for independent information, trying to hide and falsify stuff in OSM because they want to keep information from the public or at least create some form of narrative they control.
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Ok great, will do. Hopefully as it’s been 3 years since they made the edit, they have emotionally moved on.
I appreciate the research - I didn’t know how to find more about the data and the “how” they did it and exactly when.
The tenant was evicted legally as part of a precursor to the property being sold to us by the owner….the tenant worked for the post office and was our postal service worker. They were disgruntled, and then he proceeded to (for 6 months) pilfer our mail for his families mail pieces, and refused to set up a mail forwarding. We had to report him to the post master and insist he stop messing with our mail.
We purchased the home/property 1/1/2022, and it said on the “history” tab in my edit version, that the alteration on this site was made to add the name of the private drive. This means a year after we purchased it was when the user made the edit.
If it said “USPS” that would have likely been him trying to use his employments position? I don’t know. All I know is 2023 his wife ran into me and told me it was them who put up the plaque and changed the name.
Since they don’t own the property, I contacted GSI to find out what we legally could do and she said their system has it correct, as did 911/emergency and Google. As it was an illegally placed sign, she said we could take it down (an otherwise illegal thing to do had the sign been an officially placed).
As far as what we have known, in 2014/15 the property was subdivided, and two parcels were purchased by our cousin during a bankruptcy auction with the center parcel being retained due to a previous lien. The driveway is an easement that travels through our cousins acreage, the retained lien property of the bankruptcy fellow, and the farm/house in the back acreage.
From 2014-early 2016, 5 of my sisters and mother in law rented the home/property from the cousin. At that time there was no street sign of “Amazing Grace Avenue”. They moved to another state.
From 2016 until 2022 our cousin rented to a tenant that was a postal worker.
End of 2021 they were informed of the pending sale to us, and need to vacate, and were gone by 1/1/2022.
12/2022 I ran into the previous tenants wife and she told us they had put up the sign and had the private easement/driveway renamed. As I know they were only ever tenants, I felt that was absolutely inappropriate and wondered how they could have achieved a successful action without legal right.
It has caused much confusion for our customers when they use Apple maps (iPhone users), so I hope my edits will be successful.