That can be a good point. I tried to look a bit here and did not find any topic talking about legal aspect of street view.
I am not sure it is illegal as soon as you do not push private/identifiable/militray/other secret things and you are not in some kind of dicdatorship. Since, there are pictures of North Korea (like File:PyongYang-Arch of Triumph.jpg - Wikimedia Commons on Wikipedia), I looks quite save.
But nevermind, I will either stop push occasional foreign picture or switch to MapComplete.
Forgive my ignorance, but why does OSM-FR feel the need to maintain an instance for photos in France when IGN is also maintaining an instance for that region? Seems like it would be a big relief for you to only have to handle storage for a test instance with time-limited storage.
Because it is the nature of Panoramax to be decentralized and not put all our pictures in large instances that become hard to maintain in the long term.
IGN is also pushing local authorities to have their own instances, some should be launched in the next months.
Why ?
Storage cost is also an issue, even for IGN, with at least one order of magnitude higher due to full cloud based object storage (roughly 20âŹ/TB/month, which is the price we currently pay to BUY 1TB with used HDD).
We also wanted to have at least one instance where uploads of pictures all over the world was possible to allow anybody to test Panoramax.
Wow, I had not considered how granular this could get! Having local authorities hosting instances would probably make the storage costs very affordable for them. It will be interesting to see in the long-term what geographic size ends up being the sweet spot for storage storage cost vs resources available to organizations that focus on that region.
Alright. Would you recommend that I hold off on uploads or do I keep uploading? I recently checked how much space my website has and I unfortunately learned that it only has 15 GBâŠ
Hopefully youâre hinting at disagreements in German-speaking communities sometimes taking a long-ish time to resolve (or something similar), and not personal health issues.
And if that is a problem, note that it is quite fine (and in fact, preferred!) if multiple groups or individuals set multiple servers covering Germany / Austria or even just smaller divisions of them (e.g. one could setup and instance covering only their county or even just their city).
Also, if space is sparse, instead of (or in addition to) geo-limiting the uploads, one could opt to only allow a few friends to upload to that instance (instead of everyone with OSM account).
Iâm no Docker expert by any means (quite new to it actually), but that should not be a problem. For pure Docker, youâd use something like e.g. -p 127.0.0.1:8098:80 to publish port 80 in Docker instance as a port 8098 on localhost on your host machine.
(for Docker Compose it is also not a problem, youâd add something like - 8098:80 under ports: in your .yml file)
Iâve documented my experience setting up OSM-HR Panoramax instance using Docker Compose at my OSM diary entry here, so maybe it can be helpful for you (and @mahdi1234 and others).
If itâll help in new Panoramax instance coming online, Iâd be happy to help as much as I can. You can PM me, or (even better, if data is not private but could help others) @-mention me in a public Discourse thread explaining where you got stuck and Iâll do my best to try to help.
Uh, but if the issue is about it being illegal to upload street imagery, than people who were uploading those pictures to OSM-FR instance were also not legally allowed to do that either, right?
IOW, is it that taking streetview pictures (even with blurring) is illegal in e.g. CH?
Or is it that hosting such CH imagery outside of CH fine, but hosting it inside CH is problematic?
(if someone could write a short summary of the legal issues there that would be appreciated and helpful for others)
Generally speaking data protection tends to be taken, far (as in FAAAAAAAR :-)) more seriously in DACH than essentially anywhere else and the threat of litigation is always there. Thatâs OK for deep pocket big tech companies, but an issue for small NGOs and individuals.
In Switzerland the situation is actually a bit better defined than in D and A, as we have highest court case law from 2012 see 138 II 346 specific to street level images. Section 14 contains a catalogue of measures that have to be put in place by the provider of such a service. Some of these are easy to fulfil, some are essentially impossible for a crowd sourced undertaking. Hence the correspondence with the data protection office, and that was, lets say, not particularly helpful.
I would expect the requirements to be similar in Germany, but it is probably easier to get an opinion from the state data protection offices there, just nobody seems to have done that. Austria given the attitude towards dashcams, likely hopeless.
Not sure for the Austrian situation, but in Germany dashcams are only considered legal if used privately. Otherwise you might violate privacy laws. Already using it in court might bring you in trouble and you might be able to proof your innocence on rolling the stop sign, but get sued for privacy violations.
Itâs not only about taking pictures of people, but also license plates without probable cause.
In all of DACH it is more driven by the right to not be under constant surveillance (contrary to U*) and not have behavioural profiles created without consent.
Yes that can include portrait rights, but the truth of the matter is that simply blurring faces and license plates by far doesnât make de-anonymization impossible, just less trivial.
Iâll just put it simply and briefly on my phone: In Austria, youâre not allowed to conduct continuous traffic monitoring â thatâs the exclusive responsibility of the police. When in use, a dashcam is classified as continuous traffic monitoring. (This is a very rough summary.)
