I mean, that’s gotta be a balance. It’s not promising to be perfect, or it shouldn’t anyhow. It’s privacy not information security. If it’s so important that you are so worried you may just not want to use it anyway as there are always potential hackers, bugs, etc it’s a naturalist site not a bank website (and those get hacked too anyway)
2 Likes
having a black hat poking at the system is one thing. putting out a feature that you know is potentially flawed or potentially won’t deliver privacy in common use cases is another thing. in my opinion, privacy/secuirty should be near the top of the list of priorities when developing a system. just look at some of the headlines in the news. i hope iNaturalist doesn’t adopt a “move fast and break things” mentality in this case.
3 Likes
Currently, if someone does not use geoprivacy settings, the prevalence of observations in their backyard advertises their residence. iNat has a useful geoprivacy tool that sacrifices observation location specificity for the benefit of user privacy, but it requires the user to actively designate the geoprivacy for each post. This is not a security or privacy flaw, it is a convenience flaw. It just takes the effort of a few more button clicks and detail-setting. When I take pictures of bugs in my backyard, I’m usually playing with my kids, and want the observation workflow to be as streamlined as possible to minimize the interference. I don’t want to be dickering around with privacy settings.
The solution proposed is called a geofence. The way that @tiwane proposed it to function (initially) is to allow the user to locate a reasonably-sized fence inside of which all posts are automatically set to “obscured” geoprivacy, eliminating the need to do it manually. Users can at any time manually reset the geoprivacy setting of the posts.
@pisum if you have specific concerns about how this would make the situation worse, we all welcome the thoughts. I don’t think we are going to move fast and break things in this case.
7 Likes
@taitsougstad I agree, this isn’t going to break anything, and it has been talked about for a long time (since before the discourse groups). The votes clearly show there is support for the idea. I think it is likely to be implemented, so we don’t really need to argue FOR the proposal, but exploring possible detrimental impacts might throw up issues that haven’t been considered
1 Like
certainly if you stick to existing workflows, the addition of this geofence functionality seems harmless enough. but the new functionality would create the possibility for an alternative workflow(s) based on new assumptions that may or may not turn out to be valid. all i’m asking for here is for people to make sure the assumptions are valid (or at least valid to some level of confidence) before you build something based on those assumptions. (i’ve already provided one example of an assumption that GPS skills and devices provide accurate points. is that actually true? there are other assumptions that should be explored, too.) yes, it’s extra work, but, again, i have to stress that privacy/security should be near the top of priorities when developing this kind of system. and if it’s deemed to be too burdensome to do that extra work upfront, then i would say it’s probably not worth pursuing the change at all.
1 Like
Considering none of the recent participants in this conversation are the site developers I’d recommend taking a lil break until they rejoin the conversation unless folks have new thoughts to add.
5 Likes
I agree with Tait here. As far as I can tell, this is just to make things more convenient for those who a) make a decent amount of observations around their abodes (or some other place they don’t want others to see exact locations) with the mobile app and b) are dedicated enough iNat users to be savvy about geoprivacy and horizontal accuracy and be able to use the website. But maybe I’m wrong here, as I didn’t expect this request to get so many votes (not that it’s a bad idea at all, @bouteloua). I also live in a condo so make very few observations around my house except when a sweet spider gets inside.
@pisum I hear what you’re saying as far as making sure this doesn’t give anyone a false sense of security. Implementing will still take some time as it has to be written-up as a proposal, commented on by the team, then created and tested out among the team and perhaps users as well.
I’m going to close this for now and will make an announcement when there’s news about it. Again, almost any larger change will likely not happen until after the City Nature Challenge.
7 Likes
I want them all to the same spot as well. It prevents a loud which shows where you are anyway (because it has a center) as opposed to just one point which may be any distance away (as far as anyone knows) from where you are. With too many obervations maybe having all go to one spot will be suspicious, and invite people to look further into the surrounding areas… if it’s far enough away this isn’t a problem though - so the obscuration region should be more than a football field or more than a few city blocks wide.
while i like that idea (denote all obscured observations in the ‘grid’ in the same way) it is worth noting that they are not obscured within a perimeter, they are obscured within an existing grid. So if you make a bunch of obscured observations, it does make a rectangle but you probably won’t be within the center.
They used to obscure within a circle and indeed it could be used to infer where ones house or similar was if there were lots of observations.
1 Like
You’re in the rectangle, though. With one mark you might not think to notice that it is off, or might think that I am arbitrarily close, not knowing the range away I’ve set it to. With distributed obs, they give you the possible range of places, is what I’m saying. It’s a limited sort of effect, in that it also strains belief that multiple obs did come from the exact same spot, so people will notice something some of the time.
1 Like
I reckon all obscured observations that are of critically endangered species should have their location obscured by placing the pin at the location of the nearest police station.
3 Likes
One allowed geofence is better than none, but some of us have more than one residence or spend time on friends’ or family’s residences.
6 Likes
I would like the option to set “obscured” as the geoprivacy default, but this geofence feature could also address my main interest/concern.
There has also been at least one related post via the general forum here.
I would really love a geofence option. I’d need two geofences, one for my home area, and one for my work area, that can at least be set to obscured. So much hoping this feature will be realized, that would be so much appreciated for protection of privacy these days. It would make it a lot more comfortable to be able to just post a observation without considering every time if I’m in an area were my exact location shouldn’t be seen.
1 Like