iNat staff have said all IDs are equal - so expert or not is a non-starter.
Anonymous says this dog is a panda.
Anonymous says this panda is a rare ssp - but without knowing who the identifier is - that ID has no actual value. It could be that that ssp but ??
Iâm not an âexpertâ on spiders, but that is where I make ID contributions. In cases where the spider is not a common species, Iâll (usually) provide a reference for others to verify how I came to that conclusion. This takes more time, but also provides documentation and hopefully allows others to make an informed decision. If my account were to become anonymized, the same information would be available. This is one method we can use, but it requires extra effort from the identifiers. It also potentially creates more identifiers in the process, because now others can come to the same (or different) conclusion.
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Anonymised that ID would still have almost as much value. But that is one in a thousand or more.
I still donât get why there even is this discussion about âbadâ IDs. Is that really a problem that you encounter often with you use of iNat? I have almost 40 thousand observations and all I can remember is just a handful obviously mistaken IDs that I have ever gotten, so in my experience, this is a completely negligible issue. I have had far more observations affected by people deleting their IDs without a trace than by people providing unreliable ID, so I donât understand why the small problem of âID from anonymized users could be unreliableâ should stay in the way of the far bigger problem of âdeleting IDs keeps observations un-ID for eternityâ.
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I disagree with the argument that
If the observations were IDable once, then they are available to be IDed again. Thereâs nothing preventing their future ID, and, the fact that they were IDed previously suggests that they contain enough information to allow a future ID. Of course it may take a while for an ID, but this is fairly common across iNat.
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Iâm not sure that is the current thinking. This is an excerpt from the recent Job Announcement for the iNat Head of Engineering position:
The iNaturalist database is the backbone of conservation science, supports a global network of stewards, and motivates a movement of nature advocates.
Still, what you said earlier re GDPR and CCPA seem like good points.
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Letâs focus on the actual topic here, folks.
Because the deleted IDs, as a side effect of deleted accounts, problem isnât a real problem. Itâs a natural, and completely unavoidable, consequence of how iNaturalist has decided to operate. The only âproblemâ is that some people canât accept that. Which is why we have to go through all sorts of fanciful, and likely illegal, anonymization strategies to preserve data from people who no longer want anything to do with iNaturalist rather than simply respect their wishes and move with our lives.
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deleted IDs. I have not come up against - where have all the ⌠IDs gone.
I do still have a monumental backlog of completely UNidentified African obs.
You need to have relied on a power identifier to notice the gap in your use of iNat. I battle with IDs from abandoned profiles - which this anonymising the deliberately departed would make an even bigger issue.
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Seventy posts, and the most relevant point of the OP was hardly addressed.
One unfortunate side effect of the internetâs perceived anonymity is that many people no longer have any concept of owning their words. Someone makes a jackass of themself and is called out for it, the usual social media âsolutionâ is just to delete the thread and pretend it never happened. No loss of face, no consequences.
Well, scientific discourse doesnât work that way. People who wish to participate in scientific discourse need to understand that it doesnât work that way.
And if you had previously published in print journals, will Minitrue go round up and destroy every copy in circulation? And every printout ever made of the pdf version? What works for social media doesnât necessarily work for science.
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But iNat is, and has always been, both social media and science.
We need two lanes for this much traffic @danielmorton
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Thatâs because there is no parallel between iNaturalist and a museum or herbaria. The relationship between a taxonomist and a herbaria/museum is not comparable to the relationship between an IDer and iNaturalist. There are a number of reasons for this; the one currently under discussion is the right of users to delete their data.
Of course a taxonomist cannot simply undo their work in a herbaria or a museum. There is an understanding, implicit or otherwise (and very much explicit if the taxonomist is being paid) that the taxonomist is donating (or selling) their knowledge to the organization. On the flip side, there is the understanding that the taxonomist is a genuine certified expert. No such understanding, implicit or otherwise, in either direction exists on iNaturalist. At no point is the observer or IDer donating anything; ownership is retained by the user and thus iNaturalist has no right to retain anything if the user leaves. That is the legal framework iNaturalist has chosen to live under. If iNaturalist wants to keep one foot in the social media camp that sort of social media style licensing isnât going anywhere.
If iNaturalist wanted to the herbaria/museum route, and I would heartily endorse such a move, then a lot more than the licensing structure would have to change. But thatâs a whole separate discussion.
I am sorry, but waving around GDPR and âright to be forgottenâ simply shows that you have a vague idea of the problem, but not a factual understanding. The IDs are not personal information, they are not even withing the scope of GDPR. The only legal framework within which we could discuss their âownershipâ by the author would be copyright, but courts in various different jurisdictions around the world have shown that copyright does not cover facts, which the identity of a specimen arguably falls under.
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I have a very clear understanding of the âproblem.â It is not a problem of data retention. It is a problem of control and a problem of respect. Some people, and I can easily understand why, decide they want nothing more to do with iNaturalist and delete their accounts. When they do that, everything they ever submitted goes away. Other people are upset when that happens because a whole bunch of observations suddenly get downgraded to Needs ID.
And why is this a problem? The user who deleted their account doesnât, and never did, owe you (or the iNaturalist community, or âscienceâ) anything. If they want to withdraw their, completely voluntary, contributions thatâs their business. Not yours. Not anyone elseâs. But, as Iâve said before, some people just canât respect that.
Forget about the law, GDPR, and anything like that. Maybe they donât apply (although if I were iNat legal I wouldnât want to risk it.) Letting people delete their data, IDs included, is just plain good manners.
And if this harms iNaturalistâs reputation as a scientific resource, so be it. Perhaps its reputation should be a bit lower than it is now.
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Iâm new to this conversation, but I wonder if a big part of the issue people have with old observations suddenly reverting to âneeds IDâ is that because they are old, they do not show up at the front of the identify queue, and therefore it takes longer before anyone is likely to ever see them.
Would it be helpful, if a previously research-grade observation reverts, for it to also go back to the front of the queue?
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Not only would it be helpful, itâs the first constructive idea this thread has produced. Observations at least have a chance of getting reviewed and there are no issues with ex-users privacy.
You could even go one step further and let some random subset of old needs ID obs bubble up to the top of the queue for a second chance at an ID just as a matter of routine. Solves two problems at once.
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I do not see that as good manners. On the side of the remover, itâs just an abuse of the convenience of removing information from the internet. Several people have already offered counter-arguments that boil down to âif the information were recorded physically, nobody would really think about removing it just on the authorâs whimâ. With every article I ever published, I gave the publisher a perpetual license to publish the work, why should it by any different here just because the settings is seemingly less formal and the removal is easier? You seem hooked on the idea that the user has a ârightâ to delete everything, but thatâs not any kind of a universally accepted concept.
That having said, the practical part for observers would really be solved quite efficiently if the observations were re-prioritized for ID - however considering the general situation on iNat, I find this quite unlikely to happen, because it looks like possibly a complex technical issue to arrange and iNat is long-term starved for resources to implement any complex changes (and there are far more pressing requests in that queue right now).
And even though this would solve my problem with this situation, it would still mean that iNat is at a loss for data.
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I think this is an interesting idea to address one of the core frustrations of the issue, and it has the benefit of also assisting other observations; for example, even if a user doesnât delete their account, they could withdraw an individual ID. Or more commonly, a research-grade ID could be challenged by someone who thinks it was a false ID. In both cases, a mechanism for surfacing reverted-from-RG observations in the identification queue would assist.
As to where to put them in the queue when they are resurfaced, since things are generally sorted chronologically, maybe they could be placed according to the time and date on which they reverted from RG?
On the other hand, the default ordering that makes Needs ID limbo a headache is chronological, which is also generally a nice way to present the siteâs observations. Undoing default chronological ordering has introduced lots of problems in other sites, and Iâd be wary of the consequences. For example, there would then be potential for abuse in people âbumpingâ observations, perhaps by having a second account that they use to RG and then un-RG their observations; it seems silly and a hassle, but people can and will abuse systems, especially if they can find a way to automate it.
Perhaps if Identify and Explore had different default ordering, with Identify ordering reverted-from-RG observations according to their reversion date instead of their upload date, while Explore retains its default order of everything by upload date?
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I sort Identify by date observed for plant phenology.
You can choose Random, if that is what you want.
Or iNat could make a project for Reverted from RG - and people could ID from there, then filter to suit themselves.
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But the information on iNaturalist isnât recorded physically. As Iâve already explained, none of the cases where information was recorded physically are comparable to iNaturalist. The analogy isnât valid.
Youâve answered your own question. The setting isnât seemingly less formal, it is less formal. The iNaturalist/user and publisher/author relationships are very different.
Youâve also made my point for me. You gave your publisher a perpetual license to your work. No doubt it was a condition of getting published, but nonetheless that was something you agreed to. With few exceptions*, nobody has given iNaturalist any comparable license. Indeed, nobody has been asked to do so. INaturalist doesnât have an agreement with their users comparable to the one you have with your publishers.
Perhaps it isnât, but it should be. The internetâs habit of driving a bulldozer through everyoneâs privacy is well documented as are the almost universally negative effects thereof. The âright to be forgottenâ is moral principle even more than a legal one, and it trumps any concern about loss of data. And for once I appear to be on the same side as the iNat team. (At least as of five years ago.) I donât often say this, but they got that one right.
*A few people have a statement on their profile saying they want iNat to keep their data in perpetuity. They are very much the exception and the permission given is explicit. Obviously, I respect their rights just as much as I respect the right of other users to delete everything.
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