I understand this as an argument to make the slope less slippery, not to deny its existence. Earlier in this thread, I provided several examples representative of situations where we already routinely record people’s names in order to identify their business – because there is no alternative or the alternative is unknown to the public. There were hints that the custom of identifying professional practices by personal name might be cultural or regional, in which case local laws are most likely adapted to this practice. Does it make a difference from a legal perspective if we tag the professional’s name as owner=* or practitioner=* versus name:etymology=* versus name=*?
Just to get a crude sense of impact, I queried QLever for several types of professional practices in the U.S., looking for personal names in name=*, based on the prefix “Doctor”, a given name–middle initial–surname pattern, a list of the top 10 male and female given names in the country as of 1990, or some common professional postnominals:
| Tag | Personal name prevalence |
|---|---|
office=accountant |
23% |
office=lawyer |
15% |
office=insurance |
13% |
amenity=doctors |
12% |
amenity=dentist |
11% |
healthcare=optometrist |
7% |
healthcare=* |
5% |
office=architect |
2% |
office=therapist |
3% |
office=surveyor |
3% |
office=engineer |
1% |
healthcare:speciality=acupuncture |
1% |
healthcare=counselling |
1% |
shop=optician |
1% |
amenity=veterinary |
1% |
This is sloppy guesswork on my part; a more thorough analysis would find plenty more, like POIs that go by first and last name or spell out the middle name, or cases where the mapper omitted the postnominals for simplicity. I didn’t query for owner=* or operator=*, which are less commonly tagged but more likely to contain names of individuals. Also note that, outside of one or two cities, we have not mapped any kind of professional practice systematically.
As a layperson from abroad, I’d intuitively expect that we do have a legitimate interest as mapmakers in being able to identify points of interest. However, I’m obviously not qualified to make a formal judgment. If it turns out that we can’t collect this information, we risk invalidating a significant amount of POI data and ceding that kind of mapping to other data sources. Assuming community members are expressing these concerns in good faith, we should put some meat on the bones and get a formal clarification rather than resting on mere expressions of concern.