Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: All
URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:
Description of need:
Last year, platform-wide obscuration of observations with an ID of Human (Homo sapiens) was added to iNat (see:https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/automatically-obscure-observations-marked-as-human/501 ). Many observations of Humans are initially IDed to genus Homo as this is what the CV suggests. Identifications of non-Human “Ancestral and Modern Humans” are not currently possible (currently on iNat, Homo is a monotypic genus). Therefore it is highly probable that all observations IDed as Homo are indeed Homo sapiens and should be treated with the same obscuration rules.
Feature request details: Extend automatic obscuration of observations with an ID of Human (Homo sapiens) to genus Homo.
I think this makes sense to me. This is something that can be addressed by curators. I would suggest raising this as a flag on the Homo taxon page. https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/43583/flags
I agree obscuring Homo Sapiens observations is desirable. Many are uploaded snapshots of schoolmates or teachers/guides and this could be a privacy issue.
Other Homo observations are evidence of human activity (constructs or detritus) and are not living organisms.
Yes, curators could obscure, but should the observation also be hidden from general view?
To my understanding, the previous obscuration was something implemented by staff as a sitewide policy, and I’m not sure if that implementation goes beyond what curators can do on a taxon. Since the previous action was a feature request and staff action, I thought it best to make a feature request here and not just implement obscuration as a curator.
On a related note, from what I’ve been told, CV shouldn’t be suggesting Homo as an ID at all. @tiwane had said that the dev team had made a tweak a few years ago to prevent this from happening, but somehow it’s been back to making that genus level suggestion again (even as of today). Regardless, these should be automatically treated the same as Homo sapiens observations are.
I once made an observation of a mosquito and, for the sake of the Who Eats Whom? project, duplicated it to create an observation of its host, namely, myself. (It is, of course, marked casual, and the location is obscured.) I’d count this sort of linkage a minor reason not to hide Homo observations automatically.
If ‘all the sp’ are added, and sapiens is the only one, why is it possible to ID as Genus ? Perhaps iNat expects a new sp to evolve or be discovered or invented by The Singularity …
Mostly when it is used, it is a passive aggressive slur. And someone who shall be nameless, explained on an earlier thread – Homo is quicker than sapiens
I don’t see how the quality of the data in the project is in any way diminished because the observation of the host is obscured? I assume the project allows observations of other taxa that have taxon geoprivacy?
Yes, there are legitimate reasons for adding observations of Homo sapiens and for some of these reasons obscuration may not be necessary.
However, given that a fairly large portion of observations of this species are added as jokes or show people who did not give their consent for their photos to be posted online and/or people who are minors, a decision was made to obscure all observations of Homo sapiens; while there may be minor tradeoffs here, it seems to me that it is better than the alternative of volunteer curators having to individually check each observation and decide whether it warrants obscuration.
Exact location data for observations of persons also seems like it would be rather irrelevant in most cases – we do not need data on where Homo sapiens is present because every single data point on iNaturalist essentially documents the presence of a human at that place and time.
There might be some minor value in exact location data for observations of human-made objects (e.g., litter), but since we don’t have the option of annotating observations of Homo sapiens as “construction” vs. “organism”, there is no automatic way to determine which observations this would apply to. And iNat is not primarily intended for documenting things like litter – researchers who want to study such topics would probably find it more fruitful to use other data sources.
Then your observation would already be obscured due to the Homo sapiens ID. This feature request is solely that, given all observations IDed as Homo sapiens are already obscured via system-wide settings, and that Homo sapiens is the only species iNat recognizes in the genus Homo, it would be most consistent to extend that obscuration policy to the genus level.
Pardon me. For reasons others have articulated, I fully support the original feature request that the location of all observations within the genus Homo be obscured. My concern was that, perhaps through misunderstanding on my part, I interpreted one of the comments as going beyond that, to outright hiding of observations within the genus.
At what level of community agreement? Wouldn’t this risk observations mistakenly or maliciously IDed as Human in the initial ID from being seen and corrected?
“Obscuring” refers to geoprivacy (i.e., the location). It does not refer to hiding the images or hiding the observation. Observations that are obscured can be found in searches and viewed exactly the way any other observation with geoprivacy can be found. Ordinarily taxon geoprivacy is set up so that observations have the location obscured as long as there is any active ID of that taxon, regardless of the community taxon.
The verifiable status for observations of humans works slightly differently; while observations of humans are always casual, they become casual only when the observation taxon is Homo sapiens (i.e., if the only ID is Homo sapiens or if the community ID is Homo sapiens, but not if there are disagreements that put the community taxon at a broader level).
This casual status is more likely to be a hindrance to observations being seen and corrected than an obscured location. However: Everything I have seen suggests that observations of people are more likely to be mistakenly or maliciously given an initial ID of some non-human species than the reverse case – it is rare that observations of non-humans receive an ID of “Homo sapiens”.
I meant hiding from the Identify pages, which I think filter casuals by default
I can think of a few cases I’ve seen where the user (usually a new user or student who doesn’t know they can crop pics) posted an observation that got IDed as human, usually because it was not clear what the subject was, and multiple users IDed it as Human before someone noticed “Hey, I know it looks like a full body shot of a human, (or human-made object), but if you look closer you can see they are holding [X].”
I’m not saying it’s common, but it’s not rare either.
If you were referring to the causal status of human observations, why the use of the conditional (“wouldn’t this risk…”)? As noted, human observations are automatically casual; there are no plans to change this.
Which suggests that people do in fact see casual observations.
In any case, this feature request is about taxon geoprivacy for the genus (to make it consistent with the existing taxon geoprivacy for the species), not other decisions that have already been made regarding how to treat observations of people on iNat.
I personally agree that this is an issue, but it’s already the case for observations IDed as Human. I think it is largely a separate issue as the amount of observations IDed as “Homo” is much smaller than those IDed as “Human”, and the “Homo” ID is more likely to be an insult (though still not a huge proportion in my experience) than the “Human” ID. So I don’t think this is a strong reason to not treat observations with “Homo” IDs the same as those with “Human” IDs in regards to obscuration.
Not everyone takes the time to remove the casual filters.
For those who do, casual already filters out human. Why is obscured needed in addition to that?
Or would this be for people who want to see casual (houseplants, etc) but not humans? in which case, wouldn’t a taxon filter in the URL accomplish the same thing?
