Dealing with Account Deletion

[plantarum]

interesting, and a little worrying. any idea how often accounts get deleted?

[kiwifergus]

It doesn’t happen very often, but I think it can be highly impactful depending on how active the account holder was.

[silversea_starsong]

Since account deletion is most impacting for us in terms of when it removes expert IDs from our observations, I would hope a solution could work towards preserving these IDs when they affect our observations, regardless of whether the deleted user wants to delete their IDs or not.

There must be some way that the ID can be retained – surely a mere note about “Someone suggested this species for your observation” is not breaking any sort of privacy/EU regulations. For an ID suggestion, there is really nothing personal included besides the implied opinion of the person responsible for said ID.

[tiwane]

@silversea_starsong

There must be some way that the ID can be retained – surely a mere note about “Someone suggested this species for your observation” is not breaking any sort of privacy/EU regulations.

As was stated in the first post:

@tiwane

iNaturalist will always allow users to entirely delete their content from the site , both as a matter of principle and because laws like GDPR

So to reiterate, this isn’t just about laws, it is also about principle. We’ll work on an anonymization option for those who want to delete their account but want to leave their contributions here anonymously. I’ll close this topic.