Incidentally the note that the restaurant was mapped from makes no mention of ownership.
Wugh what. How did I end up clicking “Like” on that. I really do not like that.
This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.
Because the content of this topic is inherently political, I am not going to censor messages where people accuse each other of bias. Your addendum though was not helpful, throwing around inflammatory phrases like “liberal Brigade” and “mind virus” does not further discussion.
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If you look up a definition of a soapbox it includes this description: “platform used by a self-appointed, spontaneous, or informal orator”. Online forums such as this are exactly that. Everybody that participates falls under the definition of ‘self-appointed orator’.
Unfortunately @Richard I do not know how to remove your like. I think after awhile it is unfortunately permanent?
People, emotive language for a topic like this cannot be avoided, but please try to be as professional as possible and use phrases like “This is ethical because…”, or “This is unethical because…”
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This topic was automatically opened after 4 hours.
If anyone was desperate to map this sort of thing I would suggest a tag like locally_owned would serve just as well without the racial implications and could perhaps be interpretted differently in local areas.
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I am against recording this type of information for two reasons:
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I am generally skeptical about recording details that might change overnight without people noticing; for example whether a certain supermarket chain participates in a certain fair trade scheme or so. A shop owner can change overnight without the appearance of the shop changing at all.
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We are already running close to privacy rights violation in the EU by recording the names of individuals who run a business (in the operator or name tags). There is a somewhat-consensus that when individuals running a business volunteer this information on signs to passers-by, this constitutes a consent to data processing, but this is not legally watertight at all, and even if it were, this consent could be withdrawn at any time, or on a case-by-case basis. With small one-person businesses, sometimes even operated from a residential property, the line between recording a business and recording private circumstances of a person starts to blur. Recording even the names of the individuals could be seen as problematic; recording an individual person’s ethnicity or other personal attributes would certainly go too far in my opinion.
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I view the privacy thing similar to how doxing is usually handled both legally and otherwise. If I put a sign outside of my house saying “so and so residence” then I’m doing under the assumption that it will be read by my neighbors or people driving down the street in front of my house. That doesn’t mean it then gives someone on a random internet forum based in another the right to say post a message in said forum saying what my last name and home address is. I didn’t consent to that by putting the sign outside my house and it’s still doxing regardless.
So just because a business owner shares their racial or ethnic background in one instance doesn’t mean they consent to it being shared in general, no matter the context. Obviously why they shared the information and under what circumstances they shared it under matter. If not legally, at least ethically. Although it’s still probably a legal issue.
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They are by definition giving consent for it to be associated with the business. It is likely listed right on their store front or such. I do agree that any personal details shouldn’t be included with the business. That assumes the owners are not already including that information as part of thier business name somehow. For example, a medical practice advertising the fact that all of the doctors are from a particular nationality.
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The problem with adding it to OpenStreetMap by way a unique tag is that’s it not associated with the business at that point since nothing stops anyone from just making a map based on ownership tags regardless of if they include the other tags associated with the business or if the map even has to do with businesses to begin with or not.
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I’m not sure I understand the argument of “maybe someone will make a map out of OSM data”. Isn’t that sort of the point?
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Either minorities don’t map (and then probably also don’t use OSM) or there are too many armchair editors.
I think you really need to reword that in your posting, it is literally begging for outrage outside of OSM.
Nobody in this thread has objected to mapping minority-owned and women-owned businesses at all, the question is just about if that particular quality of the business should be recorded in the data or not.
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This is meant only as an observation: shopping.google.com (in the US, at least) has click boxes on search results that allow you narrow your searches to various types of *-owned business:
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I’m sorry. That was just poorly worded.
I’ve edited the post and I hope the changes better reflect the discussion here.
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As one arriving late to the discussion I see moderators strike again in favor of one political side.
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As someone who has read almost everything, I cannot share this view. Moderators are users just like you and me and are allowed to have their own opinion.
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