what's your opinion on private maps (Read 2740 times)

Howdy folks! The map locator feature is almost ready to be rolled out. It lets you see the location of routes created by other users right on a map instead of a list of routes. The feedbacks from the beta users are very positive, but some of them raised a privacy concern. As you pan around the map, you will see clusters of maps. One can assume that's the starting point (home?) of the runner that created those maps. As you may know, you can specify your maps to be private, and private maps are not visible to anyone else. The concern is that some of the maps are public because their owners didn't know about the private map check box. With the new map locator tool, it's very easy to determine where a runner lives (by the clusters of maps). One of the beta users suggested that before I release the new tool, I should set all maps to be private to protect their owners privacy. That means you will have to manually reset them to be public again if you want to share the maps. What are your thoughts? eric

I like the idea of having them private first, and having the option of making them public on an as needed basis. To be honest, more of my maps would be private, I just forget (a lot!) to check that box.

Ditto everyone else. k

I agree with the others - make the private first, and then allow people to make their routes public as they wish. Since people often run their routes at around the same time during the week, someone could not only see where they lived, but by examining their log, anticipate when they might be running particular routes.

Setting all maps to be private then having folks manually reset them to be public again is a great idea. Thanks for all your hard work Eric. I love it! I have a question about map features. (This may have already been covered elsewhere.) Is it possible to edit one of your existing maps (say make the route longer), then "save as" with a new name (still keeping the original map as it was pre-edit? That would be handy for me for some of my longer runs. Thanks, Arlene

Yep, I do this ALL the time. So far, so good. k

Thanks Kirsten. Do you make the changes, then simply type in a new name for the course and click on "Save"? (And it saves it as a new run?) That sounds way too easy, LOL! (PS: sorry for messing up the thread with this question. I should have posted it separately.) In case others get lost, eric's topic is, "what's your opinion on private maps"

I think setting all maps to private, as a precaution is the responsible thing to do. I agree privacy is an issue, and my maps are not something I would want to immediately or inadvertantly publish, due to the fact that it is a map to my house. Thank you, Big Porch

Ditto for me, although I'm pretty good about marking maps private when they are from my home. JakeKnight: Your post made my day... giggled the whole way through. mg