Geocoding with Privacy for Donors & Constituents

Geocoding of contact addresses is very useful to support e.g. emailing all contacts within 50 miles of a scheduled event. But sending the street address of a contact to e.g. Google is akin to sending the contact's full name, birth date and high school graduation date. While many contacts (donors, contributors, activists and other constituents) might enjoy being alerted to nearby events, they may not be so keen to have their physical mailing address shared in the context of a specific cause.

The enclosed patch (for CiviCRM 4.1) adds a checkbox labled "Geocoding Privacy" to the "Mapping and Geocoding Providers" Ststem Settings page with this description:

"If checked, do not include street address in contact geocoding. This increases contact privacy at the cost of lowering the accuracy of geocoded mapping and searching."

This does as stated: when Geocoding Privacy is enabled, only the city, state_province, postal_code and country will be sent to the geocoding provider (the contact's street address will be omitted).

Caveats: The button on the form is not automatically checked - not sure how to make this happen yet. The code works in initial testing but would appreciate others reviewing/testing it and I have as yet no webtests. But I wanted to get this into the next release if possible as I feel this is a subtle but important feature that may help to set CiviCRM apart from it's commercial counterparts.