Recently, in South Korea, OSM accounts deleting security facilities (military installations, transmission stations, power plants, etc.) have been increasing.
As a Korean national, I find it difficult to actively address this issue. Thanks to DWG and @KennyDap for their efforts.
By the way, have there been similar movements in your country/region to remove security facilities existing on OSM? If so, who (government, parliament, civic groups, etc.) attempted to remove what types of facilities? And how is your community responding to these movements?
Yes, this has been a problem in Korea lately. I don’t think it’s the government’s doing. Rather, the problem lies in the recent negative videos journalists have created about OpenStreetMap. As far as I understand, there have been calls on some forums to fight “Chinese spies,” which is why people are reacting this way.
Fighting vandals is actually not that difficult, as it turns out.
First, there’s a service:
It allows you to track all negative changes to the map.
Second, there’s a service:
It allows you to roll back any changes with literally one click.
I think the vandals will calm down very soon, because for every act of vandalism they literally spend hundreds of times more effort than I did to restore everything. I wanted to warn the Korean community about this right from the start, but it seems I’ve been permanently banned from the Korean Telegram chat :)
deleting power plants from map strikes me as especially pointless, as idea of hiding existence of power plants is dubious at best
if I can use Wikipedia, official documents and aerial imagery to find power plants in South Korea, Chinese and Russia then surely Chinese spies can also do that? How deleting from OSM helps anything?
“they can bomb our power plants but they cannot find it, unless it is on OpenStreetMap” would be a quite bizarre competency gap
it depends - if someone is mapping current presence of aircraft then I would
treat “Chinese spies” complaint as more plausible
it would be against OSM rules as mapping moving objects is out of scope
deleting landuse=military is quite pointless from security perspective. Is anyone really expecting this to be secret? Is military really relying on that?
Actual security would depend on distinction between “unimportant training military site” and “staging area for special forces” not being obvious, the same for say “old unused airstrip with no plans to be used” vs “old unused airstrip prepared as dispersal site for F-35 warplanes”. Or “where on this 40 square kilometers of landuse=military anti-missile silo is located”. Or “which missiles sites are empty and which ones are with very expensive equipment”.
See also war in Ukraine where initial cruise missile strikes targeted military sites - some entirely disused for actual military purposes for last 20 years, while still being landuse=military.
But if someone is mapping say specific location where specific missiles are stored then I would start asking questions. But it would not be about “are you chinese spy” but something more OSM specific: how it passes verifiability requirement?
In general Verifiability - OpenStreetMap Wiki is applicable. If some secret got leaked to the point where it can be independently verified by OSM mappers, then surely Chinese spies also know about it already? And if it fails verifiability it can be deleted from map for that reason.
For something not failing verifiability, but being useful for attacker: I would NOT update map quickly after an attack, as it provides battle damage assessment for free.
not really - and in Poland we have at least comparable risks (there are some geopolitical similarities)
though there was some panicky legislation that outlawed taking photos to an absurd degree, that quickly got rolled back on account of being really stupid. For short time you could face a heavy punishment if you had any bridge in any part of your photo, even in a background.
I know that there was some conflict about this in Ukraine, no idea how it was resolved (except that updating map after attacks was strongly discouraged).
Recently the U.S. community spotted valid data on surveillance cameras (specifically ALPRs) getting deleted incorrectly in one city, after an OSM-based map of ALPRs became very popular. No idea on the motive, but there’s speculation in the thread.
I used to be on the DWG so I’ve seen a number of requests from companies or governments to remove data. In most cases the company or government was publishing the information elsewhere.
It’s hard to treat a removal request seriously when the information is on a giant sign at the front gate or is easily found on a company website.