Stag GIS

["Ramerman, John" <jramerman@domain.elided>]

Thanks to all for the feed back on this issue.

It is obvious that people consider that details such as an address will 
facilitate car theft.  Therefore fields (attributes) which can lead to exact 
location of cars should not be included in the GIS attribute data.  I will 
modify the table structure to delete these fields and propose to have 
instead a general location field, only identifying say to suburb/county 
level.

This leads to another question (or two), which I will now pose.  That is I 
am going to play the Devil's advocate and see what happens.

What contact data do we include?  Telephone, fax, e_Mail.  Would these be 
OK?  With a person's name and general location and e_Mail, prospective 
thieves would be able to find your address quite easily.  So we would leave 
out the phone number.  Still an e_Mail in some cases will direct a 
prospective thief to your location.  Following up on the latter, I would 
suggest thieves already know where you live because of your use of this 
list.  They will just use the digital phone book to locate all those with 
your surname and stake out the area to see who drives what.  Pretty scarey 
stuff.

So what do we do about it?

This is a difficult one to overcome.  I didn't think theft of Stags was such 
a big issue.  I thought the car's bad reputation would scare away the 
thieves.  Maybe downunder we don't have quite the problem of classic car 
theft.  However I use a club lock, an anti theft system and the car is 
stored behind a locked garage door.  I live in a small court with most of 
the neighbours at home during the day.  We all know each other and have an 
effective neighbourhood watch scheme.  Fairly secure I suppose.

Apart from the above I still see a GIS as a pretty useful thing.  It could 
still be used to identify locations where cars are stolen, (eg to find a 
pattern), it could have maps displaying car runs, location of businesses 
useful to us, locate cars by general area, information pages, etc.

In the meantime I have found a person willing to host it.  I now need to 
obtain the relevant software.  More on the URL etc later.

Regards

John.