i am mostly interested in plants so when I am doing ID and such for other people I just filter for plants. I could see the point of making a seperate designated account for a research project, especially if multiple people are involved, but i think over time you may want it merged anyway.
There are all kinds of privacy concerns with posting stuff on the Internet and iNat is a place you do need to worry about it due to timestamped location info. This is not about personal rules but I would rather see two accounts than someone obscuring all their data because they are only concerned about privacy of a few observations.
How about accounts of “trolls” ? There is a person with at least four accounts (In total they might have had over 50 accounts) At the moment they are inactive (No observations, no other activity). Should at least three of them be suspended ?
Is there a clickable link somewhere about privacy on iNat?
I often see obs with an actual street address - someone uses their cellphone and has location on. This pretty yellow flower grows in my garden at 142 Main Road, Wherever.
That info should be automagically obscured by iNat - as a default.
My own workaround is to use my suburb, centred on the Civic Centre. Near enough to make data useful. But absolutely not, I live, just here, hi.
right, trolling and sockpuppeting are definitely not allowed, the accounts should be suspended… all of them if they are trolling, regardless of how many. Would be helpful though to get admin involved because they can tell if the accounts use the same IP address, etc.
I think if there is that level of concern, even having two accounts is probably not going to provide the level of security desired. It would still be relatively easy to detect patterns of movement.
I might be an example of a single user having two accounts. My personal account and my work account. I make observations via phone apps, and I have separate work and personal devices.
If this is truly a violation of inaturalist I can work with admins on a solution.
Work rules discourage the use of personal emails for work projects, and vice versa, so in order to document observations for work , I needed a separate account.
Work observations are restricted to the county where I work and observations are made only while I’m on duty. Personal observations are done on personal time.
If I ever leave this job (not likely in the next few years) I’ll work with admins to merge the accounts.
One draw back is that my observation stats are not combined, so no one can be in awe of how many observations I really make!
(1700+ on personal and 1300+ on work)
my understanding is what you are doing is absolutely fine, even encouraged given that you use a work email for the work observations so your workplace could have access to that data if you left, if that is what made sense.