I want to post observations that will show up when the town is searched, without identifying the exact location in the town. If I understand right, setting it to obscured will prevent it from showing up for the town. It seems like my best bet is to mark some location in the town and set the accuracy circle kind of big / vague.
But when I search for the town when creating / editing an observation (web) it doesn’t show me the boundaries. Shouldn’t the bounding box be displayed so you can keep the circle within it? If I search the town in Explore I at least get the outline, I don’t even get that when working on the observation.
The web uploader map does not display town borders because it uses a standard Google Maps API layer, which does not communicate with iNaturalist’s custom or community-curated boundary databases in real time. You could be having the issue because your boundary was slightly to large.
If you want the observation to reliably register within the town without pinning your exact home or location your idea will work fine. To do this without a town boundary overlay in the uploader, you have to be careful it will still register as completely within boundaries.
Open a second browser tab: Keep the iNaturalist Explore page open to search the town and look directly at its boundary outline.
Find a central safety buffer: Pinpoint a public landmark fully within the interior of the town boundary that works fine with the general location of where you reported the observation.
Drop your pin there: In your upload screen, drop your location pin
Inflate the circle manually: Stretch the accuracy circle out so it is large enough to encompass your actual location where you observed the thing, but small enough that it stays safely away from the town’s outer edges.
Not to knock your help, but ouch that is clunky. I guess next I’ll be making a feature request.
I should also mention that the way this system works, even if the bounds / bounding box were displayed, to make this work (have an observation show up for a town without revealing specific location) for a location near a border (like in a corner) it could be necessary to put the accuracy circle adjacent to the actual location rather than encompassing it. It would be nice if there was an option “obscure to town-level specificity”.
Others could formulate what I am saying better than myself, but this is kind of like a yes-and-no situation.
If you live near the edge of a town, drawing an accuracy circle that covers your actual location and stays inside the border is often mathematically impossible. I understand how that is annoying.
However, many workarounds exist, and creating an option to “obscure to town-level specificity” might induce people to start making lazy, significantly lacking location descriptions. I’m not sure if you submit for mobile or laptop, but either way, if you want to keep an observation obscured just for your town, what is clunky about simply zooming out slightly or just typing the town into your search bar and clicking it as your location? I highly suggest not using the last option; despite being very easy, it is a headache for local identifiers trying to figure out where you saw the thing. Consider that the previously stated situation happens frequently and how much more often it would occur if such an easy way to do so was added.
Furthermore, “obscure to town-level specificity” could drastically and annoyingly alter the data, especially if you were on the edges of the town. To keep the circle inside the town, you would have to intentionally place the true location nearly or actually outside of the circle to fit your preference needs.
I must admit, something along these lines has been a wish of mine for a while though, I just think if we aren’t careful our initial premonitions to the right course of action could cause more harm than good. Maybe having an option to create a personal boundary for yourself that every time you upload an observation into that area it is automatically obscured for you would be better. This is suitable because the vast majority of times a observation actually needs to be obscured that isn’t automatically are in regards to property owner issues and personal residence.
Also, iNat does allow you to hide the location of your house if that is what you want (;
After writing this I double-checked to see if any requests have been formulated or discussions had happened previously. Obviously, this is a extensively considered topic — read more here:
When I said I might make a feature request, I actually meant for showing the bounding box when selecting location. But as I noted, even that would be clunky and being able to obscure to a finer grained area (or at least index observations to a finer grained area like town) would be better. That discussion was over 6 years ago, I wonder if it might be reconsidered now.
I’m going to have to make my locations / accuracy circles more or less proximal to the real location without necessarily enclosing it. And if I want to know the real location in the future I would have to separately track it somewhere else just for my own reference.
This is intriguing. I’m wondering if they considered discussing making some community-created places reviewable, with place reviewers for them. This would potentially help the other half of the problem. Obviously it is rather easy for places like eBird to address these problems but iNat could take a leaf out of their book (maybe, idk if they would want that) and incorporate the hot-spot idea. I must admit, if they did this I would begin uploading my bird photos here again. It might be simplified if they used an idea akin to https://birdinghotspots.org/. I also recommend reading this: https://ebird.org/news/new-hotspot-about-pages-and-groups
Perhaps a system would be established where users could request areas to be added as community created reviewable locations and then it could be voted on. Coming from someone who has used this features literally dozens of times successfully (on eBird) I can attest that it is very useful. Obviously, iNat would need volunteers aside from curators then, but I don’t think that would be a problem.
*** I do not necessarily advocate for or against this proposal; rather, I offer it as a topic for thoughtful consideration. ***
@pisum you are a far more well-versed user than I am. I have been considering since this comment brought the idea into my head and then I saw your post suggesting a nearly identical thing. What do you think?
So it’s not a distraction, I’ll clarify that my use case is not obscuring the location of my residence. (I’ll leave it to folks who have that use case to advocate for it).
There are observations where I’m not willing to disclose the precise location to the whole internet, but I do want them to show up for the town they’re in (definitely in search, and preferably also on the map).
I’m not sure what you mean about zooming out slightly, but the latter is what I’m doing. And it puts the pin somewhere in the middle of town and has an accuracy circle that exceeds the boundaries of the town (and state for that matter), so then the observation doesn’t show up in search for the exact place (town) that I searched and selected to set the location.
So it’s clunky because I’m then stuck with trying to manually figure out what size and placement of the accuracy circle will put it in bounds, with no bounding box displayed.
But what is the better alternative? Like I said, I’m not willing to publish the precise location. If I use geoprivacy obscured, won’t it be a large area, make the observation not show up in searches for the town, likely show up on the map with less fidelity, and make it more of a headache for local identifiers trying to figure out where I saw the thing? Doesn’t that more drastically and annoyingly alter the data?
If you mean if the real location is too close to an edge, then yes, that’s precisely what I’m forced to do.
To be clear, I did NOT mean geoprivacy obscured. I was referring to clicking on a relevant location (e.g. trail, etc.) and zooming out the circle to your wanted size. It is clunky but I’ve never encountered the major problems that come with clicking the geoprivacy obscured button.
Unfortunately, adjusting the covered circle to your needs is the main option. Since this is a difficult problem all I can recommend is acting with discretion while keeping data, research purposes, and identifiers in mind while making a decision.
So just to sum up: the current system forces me to fudge the location of the pin and circle, and in some cases to put the real location adjacent to the circle rather than within it. And, to implement that compromise, I have to hunt for where to put the circle, because it doesn’t show the bounds of the location I selected.
This would open up a pathway to game the system to reveal the locations of observation that are obscured. This raises both privacy issues and protection issues for species that are obscured due to their conservation status.
Since it opens that door it would almost certainly be immediately rejected as a proposal.
I’m also interested in this. My partner works in cyber security, and I use iNaturalist a lot to document the species that are returning to our garden after we bought it and turned it organic a few years ago. These things do not sit well together! I want to see the species I found in my garden and not near the river so that I can count them; he doesn’t want people to find photos of our house and garden with an exact location, and a sudden drop-off in species when we go on holiday…
It would be so useful if I could have the exact location for myself, but a general location matched to town limits for everyone else. I’m not documenting protected species so it’s unlikely that anyone needs to know that it was in my garden!
Thanks @earthknight, can you expand on that? I don’t understand how it could be used to game the system. People who want to use geoprivacy obscured still could, and others could make the judgment call that obscuring to town-level specificity is good enough.
If you mean by association with observations with geoprivacy obscured from the same observer, that seems like it’s already the case.
And for species that are obscured due to conservation status, doesn’t taxon geoprivacy happen automatically?
That’s good to know about, and would be a good option in combination with what I suggested, but doesn’t solve the current issue.
I was quoting cs16-levi there:
I’m trying to help everyone figure out where I saw the thing with town-level specificity. That would work a lot better if I could put the real location in (for my own reference and anyone I decide to share it with) and automatically obscure to town-level. But at the moment I have to manually obscure it through a clunky process and sacrifice recording the real location (even for my own reference).
I’d also note that with the current system, when you set geoprivacy obscured, your own observations can still show up for you in searches for the town. If you don’t know the nuances of how this system works, that could lead you to believe that’ll happen for others when really the observations are nowhere to be found.
I do not know if it would work for you – but I use a pinned location for my home.
And idle curiosity, I check each time, and none of the pins has landed here.