Online Safety

Online Safety

DRAFT - This is work in progress - anything here can be changed without notice.

A number of countries have enacted legislation to enusre that content that they regard as undesirable is not presented to their citizens. The exact nature of such content is defined differently from country to country, but generally includes pornography and the promotion of violent or potentially fatal acts. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is not able to respond to such legislation on a country by country basis, especially where the various requirements are incompatible.

The legislation that the Foundation concentrates on is that of the United Kingdom, which is the legal home of the Foundation. The legislation of the U.K. is particularly stringent so it overlaps with and exceeds the controls imposed by other countries.

The Online Safety Act is described as followsː

The Online Safety Act 2023 (the Act) is a new set of laws that protects children and adults online. It puts a range of new duties on social media companies and search services, making them more responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms. The Act will give providers new duties to implement systems and processes to reduce risks their services are used for illegal activity, and to take down illegal content when it does appear.

The strongest protections in the Act have been designed for children. Platforms will be required to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content and provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise.

The Act will also protect adult users, ensuring that major platforms will need to be more transparent about which kinds of potentially harmful content they allow, and give people more control over the types of content they want to see.‎

Ensuring Compliance

The OpenStreetMap Foundation does not have any intention to post non-compliant material to any of the Internet sites that it controls and there is no record of any instance of such posting. The stress therefore falls on the identification and surveillance of those OSM Foundation controlled Internet sites that are potential opportunities for malicious or opportunistic third parties to post non-compliant material.

Map Siteː osm.org

The map site presents a few opportunities for non-compliant posts.

• The Discussion text chat on changesets is a possible, if unlikely due to its very low visibility, space for posting non-compliant text content. Images cannot be posted.
• The User Profile space allows posting of text content and links to externally hosted images.
• The User Diaries micro-blogging space allows the posting of text and links to external images and allows responses also in text. Other users are able to respond to User Diaries with text comments which may include linked images. It is possible for a malicious user to write non-compliant text and to introduce non-compliant image links.

Community Forum

The Community Forum website is a privately hosted instance of the software "Discourse". (https://www.discourse.org/)

The Forum is visible to all Internet users. Posting content to the Forum is limited to registered users. There are about 46000 registered users at the time of writing (11 June 2025).

The Forum allows the posting of text messages and replies to those messages. It would be possible to post non-compliant text. There is no facility for posting images or videos or for attaching files to posts or replies.

The Forums have moderators and there is a facility to flag any post or reply for attention by the moderation team.

Wiki Sitesː

• board.osmfoundation.org is a limited access site accessible by no more than 8 people and controlled by individually issued user accounts with password protection. It is not a site which has any potential for publication of non-complaint material.
• osmfoundation.org is unlimited for reading purposes. For writing or content creation it is a limited access site with a number of registered users.
• wiki.openstreetmap.org is unlimited for reading purposes. For writing of content creation it is a limited access site with a number of registered users.