Following up on this long thread in our Google Group . There has been a lot of discussion over the negative consequences of account deletion, mainly: When observations are deleted, that occurrence data is no longer available on iNaturalist. When an observation is deleted, the IDs and comments …

[image] jdmore: hopefully also selective content (like own observations, but not IDs or comments on others, etc. besides being useful in itself, this would be another way to slow down the decision

[image] jdmore: If not at the front-end, I think a “back-end” cooling off period would at least be advisable. That is, make it look as if the account is completely gone to the front-end user (and to search engines, etc.), but retain the data internally for a period of time, so that users can sti…

i think this is a reasonable interim step, but i think you should also add a mandatory exit survey that captures reasons why people choose to delete their accounts. you should capture those reasons, along with general metadata about the deleted users (sign up and delete date, # of observations creat…

I’m pretty sure I know exactly which knowledgeable curator you’re referring to, as several of my own contentious comment threads on nonnative conifer observations are now completely lacking in context. It is unfortunate that so many ranges are now of poorer quality, but having experienced and observ…

Just going to take a stand here and say sure, maybe the affected observations are small. But that doesn’t mean something shouldn’t be done. For more obscure groups expertise is critical and not everyone likes to agree with expert IDs, especially if they don’t know on their own. The small number of a…

I am not a lawyer, but from what I have read, the GDPR is about the individual person and the fact that data about you is valuable and should belong to you, not a third party. But an ID added to an observation is not information about you, it is information about the organism depicted. The only issu…

I’m liking the ideas here, since I think people should have the right to disappear, especially since there’s tons of reasons a person may have to do this, especially for reasons of personal safety. I do like the idea of a ‘cool-down’ period too, however. I remember on the Google forums someone was …

[image] tanyuu: I do like the idea of a ‘cool-down’ period too I don’t think I saw this already but apologies if I missed it, I’ll delete if I did: Can there be an email verification required before the account deletion goes through? That would be in addition to a short “cool-down” (front o…

[image] silversea_starsong: I don’t see why we can’t have stand-in IDs and comments – i.e. the IDs are kept, but the username associated with them is removed or made anonymous. Is that still against the laws? As was noted in the original post , " iNaturalist will always allow users to entirely…

[image] tiwane: " iNaturalist will always allow users to entirely delete their content from the site , it’s too bad iNat admin is taking such a hard line on this. I don’t think it’s such a straightforward issue especially when it comes to identifications and i think it will end up doing a lot…

Dealing with Account Deletion

General

saturnring March 14, 2019, 11:24pm 51

besides being useful in itself, this would be another way to slow down the decision

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Dealing with Account Deletion

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