This is the attitude I have learned to anticipate.
As far as I can tell the system is working as designed.
Hereâs my edit screen for my observation of a San Francisco Garter Snake, which is obscured by the system:
It reflects the fact that I have not chosen to manually obscure it. The system is obscuring it because the taxon geoprivacy for the subspecies is set to obscured. If you go to the observation youâll see itâs obscured.
I looked at the flag, and then looked at the geoprivacy settings. For reasons I donât fully grasp, the geoprivacy globally is set to obscured, but is set to open in Canada and in British Columbia (obviously part of Canada, but listed separately from it).
Also, if the entire genus is under threat from poaching, the genus can be flagged for geoprivacy protection. This has been done for box turtles. This alleviates the problem of having a genus ID with an open location until itâs IDâd at species.
Overall, if I think thereâs a concern of poaching, I obscure location. I did this once with a photo of ramps I found in a public park.
No, the people on the flag believe the poaching threat wasnât worsened by having the observations visible so we left them open.
No, the people on the flag believe the poaching threat wasnât worsened by having the observations visible so we left them open.
The curators say they do not think these monetarily very valuable, endangered, and stationary organisms are worth protecting. so I feel deleting the observations is the better solution.
this is neither an accurate nor a fair characterisation of the discussion on that flag
Perhaps do I not understand what you meant by âreflects what I have chosenâ. The system applied the geoprivacy as Open. Now, I did change it to âObscuredâ, but then realized that was inadequate (people still know to look; there are valuable products to be found in that area). For the safety of the animals that try to hang on, I deleted my records. There were only two.
all observations of red abalones outside of canada have their coordinates hidden from everyone but the uploader and anyone the uploader selects to trust with the coordinates. if you doubt this you can go to the explore page and search the taxon and see for yourself.
you saw âopenâ on the edit page because you had not selected to obscure the location, but since the taxon was already obscured in your region this did not make any difference. you saw the accurately placed pin because it was your own observation. anyone not logged in to your account would have seen a faded dot in an obscured location.
There are two types of obscuration on iNaturalist: geoprivacy and taxon geoprivacy.
That little dropdown you showed a screenshot of above, that says âopenâ, reflects the obscuration for geoprivacy. This setting is applied at the level of individual observations. By default when someone uploads an observation, geoprivacy will always be set to open, but the observer can change that at any time.
However, there is also taxon geoprivacy. This gets automatically applied at an entire taxon level. For this particular species, it is currently being automatically obscured everywhere in the USA. Your observation was made in the USA. This means that your record was already being obscured before you changed the geoprivacy to obscured. This is because taxon geoprivacy was being applied, so it didnât matter whether the geoprivacy setting was open or obscured.
@thebeachcomber âthis is neither an accurate nor a fair characterisation of the discussion on that flagâ
Oh, my comment was responding to the comment from Thomas, âNo, the people on the flag believe the poaching threat wasnât worsened by having the observations visible so we left them open.
It is not a a summary or characterization (fair or otherwise) of the discussion of the flags.
Thank you, I found your comment to be the most clear about the process.
Still some anomalies on my iPad (iOS 26); it seems to display slightly differently.
One, When I first did a search for this obs of this taxon, there were a few in California that displayed with open eye icon and solid teardrop pinpoints. I wish Iâd screenshotted it as I imagine you do not believe me. After starting this post - maybe coincidently - I could not access the page. I just got a âsorry, unavailableâ message. Later, when I could access it again, the display was as described - closed eye icons, except Canada. I might guess the site was re-indexing or something, during the time I couldnât open my page and it may have âfixedâ the Calif. obs.
Two, on my display, some of the obscured obs, not all, show with a solid teardrop, not a faded circle. So, that made me wonder if thereâs a glitch thatâs showing the actual location sometimes?
Then, because obscuring sometimes still clearly shows the section of coast line, a much smaller area than the rectangle, itâs still giving too much info. Iâm considering if Private would be safer, but Iâve read that people think thatâs a useless designation anyway.