When a neighbor who is just getting into iNat asked me if I had been on her land, I discovered that iNat seems to be randomly throwing some of my observations into obscured geoprivacy. Thus my friend, who lives a couple of miles away from me, was seeing some of my observations showing on her property. I’ve searched this forum and understand that some taxons are automatically obscured if the species has a conservation status, but in my case I currently have 17 common plants and insects that have been moved around a mile from their true locations. Most of my observations are done with the Seek app, if that sheds any light. Anyway, I’ve tried moving the mapped locations, but they just move right back. Is there something I don’t know? Am I doing something wrong?
Could you link any examples please?
Here’s one. This moth was actually a mile or more to the northeast. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86373349
With such big radius to move it and it being saved, you need first to move it like a lot, just put it somewhere far away, then get it back to the location you want to use.
I’ll try that, thanks.
That seems to have worked - thank you for the advice.
Great, you’re welcome!
Possibly related: I experienced a similar issue when taking photos with a device that wasn’t connected to wifi or a cellular network at the time (an old iPad). Instead of being obscured, the photos were geotagged with the location of either the most recent wifi network the device encountered, or the first wifi network I encountered on the way back, both of which were my neighbor’s. Problem was fixed the same way.
Sometimes it will happen if you have several observations in the spot where you found a threatened species which is automatically obscured by iNaturalist. Which is not a bad thing because otherwise the threatened species can be tracked by coordinates of the nearby observations on the same timeline.
I’ve never heard of this being an automatic feature, just a recommendation.
That doesn’t/shouldn’t happen, and obscured observations have time obscured, but user can accidently change privacy settings and in the past people obscured those observations manually.
It happened when I uploaded Cypripedium calceolum, which is automatically obscured by iNat. Several other species observed at the same spot were obscured, too. I did not do anything about geoprivacy - I usually obscure all localities of Orchidaceae, but seeing it was already done automatically, did not do anything. Notably, when observations “left” certain area (or time) limits of the primary obscured species, open geoprivacy was back. Again, I did not do anything.
It looks like the original issue was related to GPS accuracy rather than obscuration. Since it has been resolved, I’ll close this topic.