Yes, it is important to have some leading principles (in addition to respecting the laws).
I read all the 85 entries in the Dealing with Account Deletion discussion, closed on 1st June 2019, with a note on an anonymization option for those who want to delete their account but want to leave their contributions here anonymously. This is a very important solution. Is anonymization on the track or done? Is it a pending feature request (that needs votes?) or already a top priority?
I don’t feel confortable to further comment/contribute because:
- It is a closed topic (a topic which I was not aware of).
- The absolute rule “iNaturalist will always allow users to entirely delete their content from the site” (“such a hard line”) puts a limit to the applicability of solutions, and to the relevance to search for solutions, because this rule will ever be able to defeat all solutions to the issues that have been pointed out.
Just one thing, about identifications and comments. I agree that some kinds of user actions are not subject to copyright law. And even adding a copyright notice in a comment wouldn’t make that comment copyrightable. Copyright protects original works of authorship (only). Keeping identifications and comments (except if one puts a true original works of authorship (like a song) in an iNat comment, which would be irrelevant) should be OK.