Dear Community,
OSM implements a soft deletion mechanism. Therefore changes that are reverted will still be visible in the history. Changesets on the other hand are never deleted, neither changeset comments.
As there is no filter on the text-fields or geometries when editing OSM, I guess that this could happen in cases of e.g. (accidental) doxing of personal information or hate and agitation text that crosses legal (or community) boundaries. Are there cases where OSM data needed to be completely redacted e.g. due to legal issues (apart from the 2012 licences change)?
If so, how would I get aware of such info in a service that consumes e.g. minutely updates?
This actually has happened a couple times where some data has to be redacted for various reasons (no examples I can show, though). For obvious reasons, this is only reserved for the moderators i.e. the DWG and admins, though given them amount of edits we recieve, you have to contact them if you see something foul.
Yes
I am not aware of any such service. Most data consumers hold only one data state (the latest that they have updated to). A redaction will always be of a version of object that is not the latest, so “up to date” data consumers like that will never have redacted data in them. The challenge is with services like overpass servers that store data in previous states too; it would be useful to them to have a feed of redacted objects.
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