There’s no temporary hold on accounts. If you want to let us know more details at help@inaturalist.org, I’d be happy to look into it.
As far as humor goes, we recommend against using it with strangers because it’s so difficult to interpret on the internet, not to mention cross-culturally so I try to steer away from it unless I’m communicating with someone I know well. Even then, remember that others can see these comments and may not understand the context, so I try to err on the safe side. As someone who by nature makes a lot of snarky replies with my friends, this is not easy for me! :-)
So, I shall recount a recent data DISASTER that occurred here on iNat. An esteemed very knowledgeable curator, known to their friends as the “Master of Conifers”, who had applied a vast (global) knowledge of the entire Pinales order, (and especially the exotics) to over 16,000 observations deleted their account. Due to their knowledge of exotic species, many of these IDs were disagreements (no that is not a Juniperus, it is a Cedrus, and it is planted in this location). Meaning that now that the ID is gone, and the “planted” marking is gone, these observations have now reverted back to Juniperus and have no planted marking. In many cases, the disagreement ID was made (correctly) against an already-research-grade 2-vote ID. So now that true planted Cedrus is an RG Juniperus. The day after that account was deleted, about 200 Sugi (Cryptomeria japonica) magically popped out of “casual” and into needs ID in the US alone (and many were not Sugi). Fixing that was several days work for me. But of course I can not replace this lost persons knowledge. Name any exotic or popular cultivar pinales, and right now those maps are a total trash heap of wrong IDs and super obvious planted university / arboretum specimens.
The GRPD compliant data deletion should take the form of:
replace the users name with a new “anon_deleted_NNNNN” user ID
remove all comments made by that user (retain ID’s and DQA votes only)
replace all string @mentions of their username with the new one
remove all content from the user profile page, but keep all stats:
“User anon_deleted_NNNNN has deleted this account, was a Curator, and had 16,000 IDs given”
or even go one step further, and have the anon_deleted_NNNNN be blacked out / redacted, so that even the random serial number of the deleted user can only be seem by site admins.
Thanks for reading (and please fix any Pinales you know)
some responsibility should also be placed on the person, esteemed by some, who yet decided to delete all of their IDs. I agree that the way it works on iNat could be better, but also, sometimes people just do inexplicable things.
That is true, but I can only wish that if we had had a system as I describe in place, that those data could have been saved. GDPR experts chime in — what happens on Wikipedia if you leave / delete your account ? Since that is a cooperative editing environment, I can’t image that there is any way to back those edits out, pages would loose all coherency ? So do wiki editor comments stay ?
OK, that sounds quite appealing. What if we divide iNat contributions into two classes of things:
A) personally identifying things like comments, journal postings, yourimages and observations, etc are all “your personal data”, and can be deleted at any time, in line with European / GDPR regulations. and
B) non-personally identifying “marks” like ID’s you leave(name anonymized on account deletion), and DQA markings you add, those would be “not your data”, but a form of community-owned meta-data, and those are written into the terms of service as CC BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL just like wikipedia does?
there are the situations still of legit needing to delete an account and all it’s ID’s.
I still maintain the biggest problem is the ease with which an account is deleted, and the lack of warning of the consequences. I believe introducing a delay period and suitable warnings of how deletion impacts the community will have 95% of delete situations averted, and it will be perhaps 4% that are left to delete under legit situations. The perhaps 1% of deleters intent on doing harm (by taking away their contribution) are perhaps best left with that fairly benign impact… There will be situations of course where privacy might be of a more direct and physical nature, so iNat staff should be able to over-rule the delay period if the user communicates a valid and pressing need to do so.
well yes, I’d like for instance for the admins to delete all IDs made by sergeygerasimov and his second account (both suspended), as many people have complained to me about his false IDs, which still remain. But that is an admin decision to delete, something that should fall under our rights as a platform (and I think in the TOS somewhere, don’t make false IDs). I do like your delay idea, a cooling off period might have helped in the Conifers case I mentioned…
what about an incognito mode I alluded to? During the delay where the account deletion hasn’t gone through yet but the information isn’t visible to anyone but admins?
I just realized we do have some things already like the Wikipedia stance. When taxa are created, given common names, default taxa images, etc, those actions (being more like meta-data than personal data), are retained when a user leaves. So my above ideas aren’t really something wholly new, but an expansion of what we call community meta-data.
Consider also the contributions of a former Curator, like added taxa, taxon swaps, Taxon Framework Relationships, flag resolutions, names added to taxa, etc. While these are not always visible publicly, they are often visible (and often personally identifiable) by iNat users, and certainly by other curators. As I understand it, at least some of these contributions could not be undone by iNat staff even if they wanted to.
That being the case, it will never be possible for at least some users to completely disappear from the site.
And that being the case, I think we will need to be explicit in the Terms of Service about what content can be deleted versus what content can only be anonymized. And maybe that can include a few other kinds of content besides curatorial actions.
Just realized my post was but an expansion of the points you had already made about parallels with community metadata on Wikipedia. So yes, what you said! (Still getting used to the new forum…)
Looking back to the original post, I think that would entirely be a useful point. Having the control over what contributions are deleted and which aren’t would be very useful (and, to a point, useful to security). Having options would also help deal with a variety of situations. I think it’s also going to be more likely to end with data retention over deletion, but that’s just my thought.
• Delete all
• Retain selected (observations, IDs, comments)
• Anonymize selected (observations, IDs, comments)
Example: Say, down the road, my current account somehow were to be compromised due to leaked data. Depending on the situation, I might feel safest having the account closed to definitively prevent unauthorized use, but I wouldn’t want to remove my IDs, comments, and journal posts about paper wasps by any means. Having the option to delete a compromised account, retain contributions, and continue forward would be a useful option.
Example: Hello, world! You’ve joined the Internet and encountered a cyber-stalker, who seems to have found you on iNaturalist (though you’re not 100% positive). Things get creepy but you’re not really sure if the stalker really knows your info or is just trying to make you think they do. You get the feeling that, somehow, comments you’ve made could have helped them find you. You decide that the best option is account deletion, with comments and observations deleted, but don’t want to remove IDs from other users’ observations.
Example: A user has recently exited an abusive relationship that involved legal action. The harasser later finds them on iNaturalist. Even with the harasser’s account(s) banned, the user still feels unsafe and decides to do a full-deletion to disappear.
I personally like simple anonymization. Would there be a feasible way for the username hyperlink to be forced to something like deleted account and be grayed out (removal of hyperlink) as things stand? I might opt a bit against personally-deleted IDs appearing under a full history as that may or may not reveal that my mobile clicking isn’t always accurate .
I agree that more options should make it more likely that content will be retained and not deleted (hopefully!)
I agree! It probably wasn’t clear in my original post, but I had envisaged IDs by deleted users being anonymised in the ID history. It could also include all IDs given to an observation, not just Community ID.
Excellent! That nicely covers the warning of how impactful a deletion can be :)
I still think we need a time period, but I think the above will be sufficient. There would be very few situations where deletion needed to happen immediately, and a period of, say, 3 days for the deletion to take effect would likely have a lot of deleters changing their mind!
Just curious, I can’t recall if the deletion asks for password or not? When I deleted the Hackfalls account, I recall being alarmed at how easy it was to do, so I am a little nervous about testing on my own account to see if it asks for a password!
You now have to type in your username and click “Delete your account”.
Although I understand its use case, I’m personally not for a “cooling off” period, but I also don’t understand how one can get so angry as to delete in a fit of emotion. If someone wants to start a new thread about situations that lead to this, I’d be interested to hear it.
ahh that makes me so sad to see! i guess it’s considered a necessary evil and no point carrying on about. I hope you will consider making a ‘sticky’ algorithim ID at least so one can retain that info without having to agree with all IDs ever just in case
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