As an OpenStreetMapper, I love adding things which are supposed to be more or less guaranteed to persist for more than 10 years, such as parks and addresses. The act of seeing my parks on the map with their striking green colour gives me immense joy, and I get a similar joy from seeing the cute house numbers displayed on a series of nice rectangles.
So, it was obvious to me that addresses would be among one of my first contributions. I started looking out for areas with “nice” regular buildings who have clearly displayed their addresses in front of their houses.
My friend’s house was one such building. On a sunny day when (say) A and I were strolling, I told them about my plan to add their street to OSM. I was expecting, at the worst, some casual indifference about that whole affair. However, their response surprised me. They told me that ’the address is their private property’ just like ’the part of the street in front of their house is their private property.'
First of all, both of those statements are false. As is often the case, the street where my friend live is owned by the government, and all of its addresses are in public domain. I could, of course, have ignored this stupidity. However, I decided to reflect a little on this thing. What would a private system of addresses entail?
A private system of address would mean that the address is owned by the house owners. To prevent any intelligent guessing, these house numbers would have to be random, and can be appended with brand names to generate extra money for the house owners (like “SBI 1675343204892384123809323”). A government agency can be given the task of ensuring that the addresses remain private.
Now comes the difficult part, we have to make these addresses excludable and rivalrous. To ensure excludability we can generate a new address every time it is accessed by someone. So, if A visits SBI 1675343204892384123809323 (by paying a fee to the government agency which transfers the money to the house owner) and connects it to a coordinate, then the owner can change the address to a new one, ensuring that the next person would also have to pay the fee. This has the obvious disadvantage that once B’s personal data is revealed, A can instead connect the coordinates to B’s personal data and then sell it in the underground market. To avoid this problem, B can try to hide their personal data as much as possible, going as far as to change their personal data after a “leak.” To make the “good” rivalrous, the owner can impose a monthly limit on the number of access.
I have to admit, the above framework is pretty flaky. However, it is an OK starting point to think about monetisation of addresses. I am very happy that the above system is not practical, and so mapping addresses is still a useful endeavour. For now.