Mapping Privacy Discussion

Hey everyone,

It has come up from time to time that, although we have private blogs, the maps used in those blogs are in fact visible to the public. I'm thinking of some options to try and add a bit more privacy into the mapping section. Three immediate options come to mind.

1. A setting that will hide all your trips on Travellerspoint (or maybe per trip) except for when they are embedded elsewhere. So you would be able to see the trip in the blog, but not in the map on Travellerspoint's main site.
2. A setting to hide the dates on your map for future trips. The concern here is people being able to see that you are not home at certain dates. So just hiding the dates until after the fact resolves that issue.
3. A setting to hide the trips from people that are not your contacts (mutually following) on Travellerspoint.

I don't want to create a password access like we have for the blogs now. While it works well enough, it does have it's problems and would become a bit of a mess if I tried to also apply it to the maps.

Interested in your thoughts.

I don't know yet what these maps are...

In my blog I've created and posted my own maps by doctoring Google maps. I've been doing this for about four or five years now and I can work them pretty successfully.

The other thing I don't know is how to access blogs to read them. I certainly know how to find mine, but there doesn't seem to be a path to beat my way to the doors of others.

How do you do this?

Quoting Ray Bell

I don't know yet what these maps are...

On the home page there is a link to "Your Map"

On this page, right at the top there is a link to "Your Travel Map"

Both will take you to the maps.

If you are using static images of Google Maps then this discussion is not really relevant to that.

[ Edit: rest of discussion has been moved ]

I struggle with the balance between 1) wanting my trips to be public, as they can be useful for others here on the forum to serve as inspiration for where to go, and 2) wanting them to be private, only for my own documentation, and 3) simply not wanting them to live in a database connected to the internet at all. (Obviously this last scenario is not one which should be your concern.)

I stopped creating maps back in 2011 when you moved over to Google Maps, where a privacy-aspect (not wanting Google to be able to build up an even fuller profile of me) was the main reason.

With the current mapbox system, that has gone away, but my main worry these days is connecting cross site activity to de-anonymize me at other sites. My profile here is directly connected to my main identity, but what I worry about is that in other communities, where I use a completely unique identity and attempt to not tie them in to anything real life, I happen to mention a visit to New Zealand in year X in one thread, a visit to Bolivia in year Y in another thread, and stopped posting for two weeks last year, and that if you gather that information together and line it up with all public travel logs, only one profile will match, namely mine. (There have been many studies showing how successful such de-anonymization attacks can be, always with surprisingly little data.)

All suggestions you give would help with this, so would be good to have, with the third option being the most useful for that scenario - though it's also most far-reaching.

Some more ideas in this space:

• Specific dates on stops only visible to the owner (and optionally friends), falling back to just the year when viewed by others. (And make that the default for future trips?) - That would definitely be a setting I'd turn on. (For many of my trips and photos, I already do this simply by only filling in the year, but I haven't bothered to go back for old things, since the information is out there anyway - but if I could have a one-click solution, I'd very much like it, as it might still do some good.)
• Harder: Specific addresses only visible to the owner (and optionally friends). Don't allow the map to zoom in to the lower levels here, and position the destination dot on only one decimal precision of longitude/latitude? I see lots of annoying edge cases that'd reduce the privacy benefit from this, so probably not worth it like this - but in general, worth thinking about the space of reducing information for outside viewers?
• Hard-to-guess shareable URLs for trips, as an optional setting. So when a trip is shown as "private-ish", don't show it on the main trip map, and prevent the /trip/ID URL-syntax from showing the trip - but offer a copy/pasteable URL /trip/UUID as an alternative to get there.

[ Edit: Edited on 12 Jul 2022, 08:27 GMT by Sander ]