Legality of adding businesses that aren't ours

Is there any legal recourse that I need to worry about when adding businesses? I use maps generally to find places (like Chipotle) so I was thinking of tagging all of the nearby ones. However, given I don’t own the business, I don’t know if there would be any repercussions if I add any incorrect information or not update it if something changes.

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Hello and welcome to the new forum!

There should be no problems for you resulting from your mapping activity. Everything which is visible to the public is being mapped, and POIs are an important part of it. So feel free to add things you come across. That’s what makes OSM in the end.

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OSM mappers regularly add features based on survey and only vanishingly small part is from people mapping what they own and operate.

I expect that problems may in theory happen when you add info which is both untrue and malicious.

But it is against OSM rules anyway.

This is impossible to answer correctly without an indication which country you are adding POIs in.

For example there are countries in which privacy legislation extends to legal entities and in which it can be problematic to add companies to the map against their will.

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In which countries it is applicable?

(BTW, China and some other countries have some laws which are generally problematic for OSM mappers, see Restrictions on geographic data in China - Wikipedia )

Thank you everyone for your responses! And for context I’m mainly focused on the US (primarily California). Noted, maybe I’ll primarily add places but as far as hours I may just decide to leave that blank. Whether they’re opened or closed down the road…I think we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there.

AT and CH (till sometime next year) for example.

Is there any legal recourse that I need to worry about when adding
businesses? I use maps generally to find places (like Chipotle) so I
was thinking of tagging all of the nearby ones. However, given I don’t
own the business, I don’t know if there would be any repercussions if I
add any incorrect information or not update it if something changes.

Welcome to OSM! As others have already said, what you’re describing is the norm in OSM. Nearly all the PoI (like shops) that are in OSM have been added by people who don’t own the PoI. :grin: Happy Mapping.