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: