Slashdot Mirror
First Crowdsourced, Open Data Address List Launches In the UK
The internet is a great place to search for some kinds of information; Amazon (or L.L. Bean, or Digi-Key, or any retailer, really) do their best to connect you with all the products in their databases, and for lots of other search topics, the usual handful of general purpose search engines can ferret out answers based on your keywords. Addresses are sometimes harder to search, but in the UK at least that might soon be much easier: An anonymous reader writes The London based startup and open data advocacy organization Open Addresses UK wants to change all of that by inviting the public to collect and validate housing addresses to build the biggest UK open address dataset ever. To do so, they launched UK's first open and free address list on Wednesday, calling on individuals and companies to crowdsource information."
What if you want the equivalent of an unlisted number, though?
Right, but they charge a lot for programmatic access to, or for offline lists.
A crowd sourced list gets around Royal Mail's intellectual property and makes this data freely available for anybody to use.
What if you want the equivalent of an unlisted number, though?
Then you are thinking of something else, like the electoral role or exclusion from the phone book (which also includes addresses).
This is the equivalent of the Royal Mails Postcode Address File - matches locations to addresses, postcodes to streets, house numbers to postcodes etc. No names or occupants involved.
So there is no such thing as an unlisted address - its like BT releasing a list of all phone numbers without names of the people who you can call using them. Except having the address database is a damn sight more useful, as you don't deliver stuff to a phone number...
I already opted out of this via the Electoral Register, I do not want some random startup faffing about with it. They have not got a single convincing reason for doing this. Have a look:
"Open Addresses UK Director Jeni Tennison states that addresses are an essential part of a national infrastructure. “They connect us to wider society and help us to access services. Everyone needs to be able to use addresses freely, which means they need to be open.”
No, not everyone does need to be able to use my address freely. In fact, they are explicitely restricted from doing so by various laws. My address is used and disclosed at a point of my choosing.
"On a more serious note, Wells explains that address data links together the digital world with the virtual, and by connecting these two worlds, better services can be given to everybody. When combined with and linked to other open data sets, allowing startup companies and developers access to this data will encourage the development of new goods and services, the organization states. When combined with and linked to other open data sets, allowing startup companies and developers access to this data will encourage the development of new goods and services, the organization states."
'Better' by who's definition? Startup companies - who on earth said I wanted to help them out?
Wells says that Google Maps could also use the open address data to improve the quality of their services. The open data can also inform devices to perform tasks with the data collected. Wells further explains that they keep the quality of the data high by using existing open, clean data sets that can help corroborate new data coming in.
Why should my life be lived in order to 'help out' the multi-billion dollar corporation that is Google? I already use as few of their services as possible. 'Inform devices' - which devices, and who says I want them to be informed?
The idea has no use cases put forward which benefit me, which allow for my consent, and in fact I believe an amount of this form of collection could actually be covered by Crown copyright laws as it is essentially duplicating the Electoral Roll.
Not with fourteen barge poles tied together would I touch this.