Let me rephrase that - how do we find our flags.
I couldn’t find ‘flags’ via the Forum, or iNat Search.
As a workaround, I will use the Copyright flag to force a picture out of sight.
I sent you a direct message with the link to content you flagged.
Yes - thank you.
But generally. Other people may also be interested in finding their flags again for other issues. It would be useful to have a link on our profile page.
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If humans were hidden you could still do this, but the photo would be hidden once IDed as human
inaturalist.org/flags gets you to the list of all flags, and then there are search filters where you can filter by flagger
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The google street view blurring AI has a failure rate that would be unacceptable for inat, often blurring people’s butt instead of their face, if a butt looks like a face to the AI, imagine how many animal faces would be hidden
I would oppose any AI based moderation, becasue the tech just isn’t at that level yet, the failure rates in computer vision are so high that any such moderation method would create a massive amount of work fixing all the false flags
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That would stop something from being moved out of human, too, though. Which is a huge downside and I think would be a terrible situation to be in. Somebody marks something falsely as human when there is an organism to be IDed, and now it’s lost. Obviously it depends on how it would be implemented and what the true functionality would be, but you get what I mean.
I’ve seen people ID observation as “human” because they don’t see where the organism is or they think the image is too poor quality to ID. I think that’s a misuse of an identification and could be avoided if people used the DQA, but it still happens. In that instance, would the incorrect ID hide a valid observation? How would that be fair to the person who uploaded the observation? How easy would it be to move those observations back out of the “human” label? Hopefully if something new is implemented, there’s a simple workaround for stuff like that, but it just brings a lot of questions with it.
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This is the same concern I have, if implemented right this would only hide the photo, not the whole observation, so non-human IDs could be added and the photo would un-hide automatically once the community taxon was not human, this way others who know you are a trustworthy user can add non-human IDs and fix the observation if it was maliciously IDed human, but this still leaves the problem of how to ID something with no photo in cases where there was actual uncertainty whether somthign was a human artifact or animal sign
True, street view AI specifically may not have been the best example because it is optimized to almost never miss readily identifiable human faces; the costs of false positives are effectively zero in that application. I’m pretty confident that automated face identification can be done to a satisfactory false positive rate with current technology (maybe snapchat or tiktok face filters are a better example), especially if we only blurred photos already tagged as having a human. The question of whether it is necessary or desirable is separate.
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Yes it is. Explicitly. It has been proposed that images in which the subjects appear to be expressing an unwillingness to be photographed should be removed.
I get that we live in times when this sort of thinking is commonplace and used to justify all sorts of stuff. It’s dangerous nonsense, nonetheless. Respectfully, the idea that anybody can know the state of mind of a person in a photograph in the absence of any supporting contextual information is implausible.
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I just thought of an example of an observation where I think a piece of the ‘engagement with nature’ aspect of inat would have been lost without the photos that have human faces:
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/22612-holy-mola-the-oral-history-of-an-inat-identification
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/20522357
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Interesting obs of a sunfish, with an incidental group of people for scale.
Tick tick tick.
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My proposal was to hide photos of observations with a Community ID of human, which means at least two users have IDed it as human. So one person wouldn’t have the power to hide a photo. And it could say something like “photos attached to human observations are hidden from view”.
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I see that with some plant photos, too. It might be best to use the CV (if one is ever set up) only for observations that have at least one identification of human. (Or it might not.)
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True, the people being included in the picture adds nothing to its scientific value. And there are plenty of photos of this organism in other observations that do not contain people. However, every single picture that made the international news articles about this observation (or any other mola tecta observation that has made the news) does contain at least one person. Because the international significance of the story is not its scientific value, it is the human interest story of connecting people all around the world to nature and science. And inats priorities are supposed to be connecting people to nature first, scientific value second.
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Maybe I am missing something, but if the photo is hidden, how do other users identify it as non-human? It seems like once it is hidden, the Community ID is going to remain as “Human” due to evidence to the contrary being unavailable.
Also, this proposal
basically proposes making moderation decisions based on a user’s reputation or other users’ opinion of the affected user, which I am pretty strongly opposed to. Being a known user is no guarantee that a user has acted appropriately - Many established users occasionally (or even frequently) make mistakes or violate guidelines. And a system like this would seem to be inherently biased against new users without a track record or users who aren’t known to whoever is doing the proposed moderation. New users often need education, not instant repercussions based only on the fact that they are new.
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I could agree with this if we were talking about a different social media platform where sharing photos of people was more central to its purpose/functionality. But, a joke photo as you’ve described just isn’t what iNat is for. We aren’t talking about the broader internet, but specifically iNat. Now if you were holding a fish, the observation is clearly for the fish, you are joke hiding from the camera, and there is no malicious text, I don’t think anyone here is suggesting that those photos get hidden entirely.
So if the worst case scenario is irrelevant photos get hidden and the best case scenario is malicious photos get hidden, I don’t see the problem.
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Ultimately, I’m not sure trying to fit more traditional social media content moderation into the iNat observation framework is all that advisable. Flags and better information about them to IDers seems like the way to go.
I really like @ItsMeLucy 's phrasing of “privacy concern”, and I would almost advocate for staying vague in terms of policy. These matters can degenerate into trying to game the system (especially when dealing with teenagers, who have an amazing ability to suddenly turn into incredibly creative rule lawyers when it suits them, at least I know I did).
Does iNat staff have data on frequency and turnaround time of inappropriate content flags (as opposed to taxon flags)? I’d expect them to come in burst around big events (CNC, classwork in certain seasons, etc.). If there are these consistent patterns and they do affect response time, would involving community volunteers be an option?
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I don’t know how else you would interpret this statement from the OP.
Yeah, I get that. That in no way justifies censorship based on subjective judgements about the mental and emotional state of anonymous persons in photographs. Formal policies designed to minimize bullying and harassment I can support. I have already said as much. The specific proposal which I quoted (3 times, now) I do not support.
The latter part of the OP’s sentence that you did not include in your quote made it clear that they were not talking about photos where humans were not the focus of the observation. Also notice the phrasing “deliberately targeting” (emphasis added). Almost all if not actually all the conversation regarding selected (vs. hiding all “human” observations) full photo removal (i.e., not partial removal such as facial blurring) has been regarding observations where humans are the target of the observation and the observation is irrelevant at best and malicious at worst.
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