[Qgis-user] Data Privacy

[Greg Troxel]

Toby Clemett via QGIS-User <qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org> writes:

> If a company or organisation decided to open locally stored sensitive
> location data within Vanilla QGIS, would the information stay on the
> user's hard drive and not be shared with QGIS or anyone else
> externally?

If you configure an online tiled map layer, then qgis will fetch tiles
that are in the viewport.  So if you open say a geopackage with 20
secret locations in a project with OSM tiles from some commercial
provider, then that bounding box will be revealed.  If you zoom in, then
another round of fetches will occur at higher zoom and smaller bbox.
Whether this is ok depends on your secrecy needs, your agreement with
the tile provider, and whether you believe any of this.  Of course, you
should be rational about overall risks, and if you are running Windows
and relying on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure (see the news if you
haven't; it's OT here) this coarse-grained tiled leakage may not be a
significant issue compared to your total set of problems.

This is of course not about qgis in particular; any GIS software will do
this.  And, by configuring a tiled layer, you are instructing qgis to do
this.

The solution is obvious: download OSM data, and set up your own mapnik
server, and configure that instead.