So it basically means that some random iNat users “familiar with the species” are supposed to be more competent to judge about any species than actual experts in these species from the IUCN SSC expert groups. Really? Someone can say “poachers will come and capture it to sell to collectors” about literally any species. Experts should judge if it’s a real threat, an insignificant detail or a paranoic fantasy, and they already did it in IUCN Red List. It will be not better assessed in the iNat flag discussions. What you’re proposing is that scientists are supposed to spent thousands of hours to prove for non-experts on iNat what is already known and available from IUCN Red List. Obviously very few will. As a result many populations that could be protected thanks to the findings from iNat will be destroyed instead, unknown, due to the destruction of their habitats. Which is the actual main threat for nearly all species (but sometimes it can be prevented thanks to the records of the protected species).
My reply would have been a subset of Igor’s: let the auto-obscuration be based on the IUCN stated reason why the taxon is endangered.
So.You catch the poachers, and retrieve thousands of tiny succulents. Great.
Now. You don’t know exactly where they came from. Cannot ‘take them home to their mother’. They are rescued to nurseries. But the loss in the wild can lead to extinction.
Same issues around reptiles and insects, but then the rescues are often dead already.
If you would change the rules and management of obscuring location - we need to be asked again - to provide permission for our obs. Or not.
IIRC in other threads it was stated that the obscuration system in its current state is not to/can’t be altered. Is there something in the works to replace it somehow? 
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