More privacy friendly Maps options needed: OpenStreetmap

[MacLemon]

Summary:
More privacy friendly Maps options needed

Steps to Reproduce:
Create an event location.
Look at the location, have Google Maps set multiple tracking cookies on your machine.

Expected Results:
Maps should be more privacy respecting to the visitors by using a different map service, or at least offer a choice of maps services with the most privacy preserving one being the general default.

Actual Results:
Google Maps is integrated and tracks all visitors, even if the instance owner/admin doesn't want to track visitors.

Regression:
All content should only be loaded from the local instance and nowhere else ideally.
In case of Maps, this is likely quite complex.

Quote from the https://gettogether.community/about/privacy/

[You can mention Google services here and link to Google's privacy policy if you want].

You must be compliant with GDPR and hence that mentioning of Google is not optional but absolutely mandatory.
The same would apply to any other mapping service, but unlike Google, OpenStreetmap does not track their users.

Notes:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/ would be a better suited default mapping service that respects user's privacy and offers a lot of helpful local information.

Ideally The site would proxy all the OSM data through itself to abstract any user's connection by only exposing the instance's IPs to the mapping service. This would also reduce load on the mapping servers and allow for speedier connections due tile caching becoming possible. (Would increase server traffic a little, but that's worth the increased privacy protection.)

Version Information:
GetTogether 0.8

[mhall119]

The privacy policy has been updated to explicitly mention Google Maps.

In order to replace it with OpenStreetMaps, we would need somebody to implement the features we use Google Maps for on top of OSM, and also we need to know what the API call limits are on OSM.org

[craigmaloney]

Not sure how things are currently implemented but we could use something like Leaflet to help ease the transition (https://leafletjs.com/)

[7usr7local]

I'd like to see a "User requested" badge/label here 🙂

[brylie]

Either Leaflet (mentioned above) or OpenLayers would provide an abstraction to support multiple map providers.

What are the features that would need to be implemented on top of the map layer?

[mhall119]

In addition to showing the map, we need to be able to place pins showing known Places and also to be able to retrieve Place data from the map's data sources based on a clicked location.

[craigmaloney]

Quick thought: Is there the concept of a private place? If not then that would be something to keep in mind (not all places should be places that are exposed to all users).

[mhall119]

Not yet, but I think there's an open issue for that (and private events altogether)