By: Bersabel Tadesse
Starting today, all tilesets are private by default. Any user, free or paid, can now create unlimited private tilesets with their Mapbox account.
Tilesets are how we keep maps fast. They are cacheable, load quickly, and we rely heavily on tilesets to keep our maps performant. To create a tileset, a developer must first upload their data to their Mapbox account. We know many of our users — whether they were dealing with their own user data or designing a custom style for their re-brand — upload proprietary data and want to make sure their tilesets are not publicly available. Whereas others, who use open data sources to create tilesets, like from Data.gov or Natural Earth, often want to keep their tilesets public for collaboration. Now any developer, paid or free, has the option to do both.
Coria, a leading firm providing data science tools to marketers, depends on private tilesets to meet their strict requirements around privacy and data security:
“Of all the companies in the geospatial arena, Mapbox stands out because they’re consistently out-innovating the competition. We needed an application architecture that combined beautiful, responsive mapping with data security at its core, and the Mapbox engineers made it happen. Private tilesets allow us to ingest, process, and publish large datasets in near real-time — all on the platform our development team loves the most.” - John Hobart, CEO at Coria
Getting started
For developers on the new pay-as-you-go pricing plan, all tilesets are created as private by default when using Studio, the Uploads API, or Tilesets API. When a private tileset isn’t necessary, they can be made public by adding the private:false property in either the body of a Create an upload Uploads API request or the body of a Create a tileset Tilesets API request for new tilesets.
Previously created tilesets can also be made private retroactively by selecting make private in studio.mapbox.com/tilesets:
Have questions about private tilesets? Just let us know.
Bersabel Tadesse - Director of Product - Mapbox | LinkedIn
Unlimited private tilesets available for all users was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.