Posted by Autumn has arrived. 🍁 Do you also enjoy the casual autumn walks through the golden-brown forests? If there is no, then welcome to our development basement, where I may present version 3.52 to you. 😏
Resolve geocoordinates
In April we threw out Google Maps for you and replaced it with the privacy friendly OpenStreetMap. Your feedback helped us to approach the topic and of course to drive it forward. One of the topics was the better resolution of address data.
We have made a change in this version so that addresses can now be resolved to coordinates more easily. We go from the fine to the approximate. In other words, first we try the full address, if it doesn’t work, we gradually reduce the information content e.g. by trying to resolve only the city and not the street.
In addition to the above mentioned change, I would like to briefly explain how we protect your privacy when using OpenStreetMap. With Google Maps, addresses were sent directly from ChurchTools to Google. Apart from the address, no other personal data was sent to Google, but Google knew from this call alone that an address belonged to a specific ChurchTools installation. It was possible to draw conclusions about this.
Exactly this question came up now in the forum and therefore I would gladly like to pass this information on to all of you. We found a trustworthy German partner who offers this service to us via OpenStreetMap. This company receives from us only the address data and no further information. We are going as far as to set up several proxy servers for this purpose. This means that the address is first sent to one of these proxy servers, which are located in our datacenter, and there the requests are anonymized again in order to send them to the named partner. The partner does not know from which ChurchTools installation the request comes and therefore cannot draw any conclusions about addresses and churches.
Further Changes
For this version we fixed some bugs again. Have a look at our changelog to find out more.
We hope you like the new version as much as we do. As always, you can leave praise and criticism in the forum.