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).