Access to data for sensitive and obscured observations

I agree. But that is how it works. All IUCN threatened species locality data are automatically hidden, unless a curator (not the iNaturalist staff) unhides it.
There is confusion between (IUCN) Threatened Species and (data) Sensitive Species: the two are not the same, although I argue that Sensitive Species have to be Threatened Species.

that isn’t true, and has never been true for most of the areas i look at, except for more recently with Canada.

From conservation agencies, if need be and i so desire it than yes. More precisely, anyone who I have not chosen to share them with.

That is how the obscuring system on the site was built that the decision to make available obscured locations exclusively rests with the submitter of the data. And that is how it should stay.

I have no issue sharing with people i have approved, I have done it for many. I have an issue with processes that do not respect the wish i have indicated to share or not.

If you feel otherwise there is a request to turn it off in the feature requests, go vote for it. Without checking, i believe yours would be the 2nd vote

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as recent issues have come up with a certain ‘conservation’ organization running around shooting people, as well as a certain ‘dear leader’ becoming in charge of a bunch of biodiversity protecting agencies in a country (actually several countries if we want to really look at it) and trying to gut them, i think it’s clear that we should not force iNat users to offer blanket trust to any said organization. That needs to be a decision by both the user (self obscuring) and iNat admin (auto obscuring if there is poaching risk). Because auto obscuring policies vary over time sometimes, if there is something you also wish to obscure for privacy reasons (ie a rare auto obscured species that occurs in your yard) i suggest you also manually obscure yourself rather than leave it to auto obscure to do that.

Sorry. The project is the Herps of Texas Project which is a traditional project. When it was set up, the stakeholders (Texas Parks and Wildlife) set up the requirement that all locality data in the project must be visible to project curators. So the project automatically imports data for TX Herp sightings where possible.
However, if you try to add a record that is not in the project you get an error that says " Didn’t pass rule: observer must allow project curators to view coordinates."

I think most people really don’t think it through when they check those boxes.:slightly_frowning_face:

@tiwane - can you please confirm this is the case. The option in the traditional project specfically says it is to grant rights to private / obscured sightings.

‘Do you want to make your private/obscured observation coordinates visible to the project curators?’

It should have nothing to do with preventing records with open coordiates not going into the project, at least as I understand it.

If a user refuses to grant access to those gps locales or their records to be added to a project by anyone other than themselves, yes, they are unavailable, but I’m not getting this combination ?

For things I really worry about, I never make that assumption, and always select obscured geoprivacy for my observations of those taxa.

If you have a bunch of obs you are worried about, might want to consider going back and filtering and editing in batches to add your own obscured geoprivacy setting to them.

…unless I was misunderstanding what you were saying there…?

Unless there is some process I am missing, if I go to enter a record for a species which is auto obscured, there is no way to go and say I want to manually obscure it as well

Here’s where to manually set geoprivacy observation-by-observation regardless of taxon geoprivacy:

Browser uploads page:

Android app:

Browser after uploaded, edit screen:

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And to add to @bouteloua’s post… When batch-editing existing observations, geoprivacy is available in the “Description, Tags, & More” panel, or up top as a batch option under “More Fields.” Not the most visible or obvious places, but it gets you there…

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Does iNat have different rules for the USA? It is certainly true of other countries I have looked at …

maybe the US just has had more adjustment. I don’t feel like there is a clear policy, though given some recent events i am now wondering if calling for one wasn’t a bad idea.

I think Tony is correct about IUCN status being applied globally unless curators alter them, but in areas where countries, states, provinces, and even counties have lists of ranked species, the lower-level jurisdictions override the global status. So in the U.S., especially, the global status is hardly ever used because the states all have their own lists of vulnerable species, but in many other countries the IUCN status is the only status available. Also, in all cases curators can change the obscuration independently of the status and much more curation has been done in the U.S. thanks to iNaturalist’s early growth having been concentrated there, so the original logic of obscuration is much less obvious there.

So, you’re both right. I think.

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Makes sense. I think in the US there has been some parsing between ‘Threatened’ and ‘needs to be obscured to protect the species’, a Venn diagram setup of which there is a fair bit of overlap but also a fair bit of species that fall in either circle but not both… just due to early adoption, etc as you say. In South Africa, I don’t think that process has happened. In Canada, all the observations in either circle got tossed into being obscured, but it sounds like there is hope most of them will be take out of the bucket leaving only the ones in the ‘needs obscuring to protect the species’ category.

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Recently a new species of Ode was reported in my province. The location was obscured. To find the location I redacted by moderator

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BJ, first off welcome to the forum, nice to see more Ontario folks here.

This is a known issue, but the accepted practice here is not to reveal on the forum ways by which people can try to game the obscuring, so it may be better to remove or edit this.

(Edited to remove certain specifics) there are many simple ways to alter data to keep at-risk obscured observations truly safe, and I suppose that’s all that needs to be said.

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@lakingbj i don’t ever do this other than during extreme times but i edited your post to remove your posting of a way to get access to obscured coordinates. Please do not post that sort of thing on the forum where others can see it! I know that particular loophole is not hard to figure out and for what it’s worth, the admins have a proposed solution to it, though i don’t personally think it is a good answer, either way it will get addressed somehow. Please be aware when obscuring of other information that might allow one to see where your obscured location was.

@er1kksen maybe you should edit to make this a little less obvious too? I agree it’s a good idea to change or remove timestamps, it makes a lot more sense than just obscuring everything observed that day, which ruins a huge chunk of data. I also just don’t observe ginseng. I mostly think the concern about poaching or harassment is overblown (an ode? really?) but in the case of ginseng i think it is justified.

Agreed, and done. I do try to observe ginseng as NYNHP is using iNaturalist as one platform to keep track of occurrences. I was pretty horrified to hear about that “obscure by day” concept, it would probably end up obscuring half or more of my observations. I suppose I could preemptively alter the datestamps of obscured species to save all the rest, but unlike ginseng most of these are state-ranked species because they just occur in just a couple southwestern counties, with zero poaching risk.

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