There are many photos of fish being held up by proud fishermen/women and some being held up by children. I’d exempt those, too.
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Yeah, this is why I was thinking of some sort of “faces must be obscured” thing instead of just no humans in photos.
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Usually this could be accomplished by cropping the photo.
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There’s also the “bug on face” genre of photos, although I feel like those are usually either selfies or taken on request by the person with the bug on their face. Depending on angle, focus, etc., the person may or may not be especially recognizable. (Linked photos/obs are some of the many I tried to take of malachites landing on me.)
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Obviously photos identified as Homo sapiens should be deleted. They have no value.
In addition nonconsensual photos, especially of minors, are pretty much guaranteed to violate European GDPR laws.
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Indeed.
But since iNat is about the fish.
Not the pride.
The obs should be about the fish, and crop out the proud person.
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I think this is the type of instance where if there is a “no photos of human faces” general rule in place, photos like this could be hidden/obscured, but still veiwable by the user (and other trusted users, like with obscured locations currently). Preserves the data and record and allows people to save their own experiences with nature. I think also avoids the mentioned issues with European privacy laws (that I am not super familiar with).
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- Watch out for inappropriate content: Unfortunately, much of the inappropriate and offensive content that has been posted to iNaturalist has come from students who have been assigned to use iNaturalist. Look out for insults, racist comments, selfies, and joke IDs, and be very explicit with expectations and consequences before using iNaturalist with your students. Each observation on iNaturalist is public and available for the entire world to see.
That is aimed at Educators.
But iNat needs to take its own advice about selfies and enabling ‘joking’ cyberbullying. Not a comfortable space when looking out for victims.
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All you need is a few vandals to go identifying people’s photos of animals or plants as human, and poof, those photos will disappear? I agree on the need to address the problem, but it needs to be carefully thought through.
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iNat doesn’t enforce national laws in other arenas either. Users can post poached organisms, handling organisms when it is illegal, observations taken in locations that were accessed illegally (trespassing), etc. By this logic, iNat should disallow photos of any activity that is illegal somewhere in the world. Attempting to enforce laws like this for a global website really isn’t feasible. Disallowing photos of potentially illegal activity would quickly lead to huge volumes of photos being disallowed from posting on iNat and curators would need encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s legal system to enforce.
In terms of
How would curators (or anyone) enforce this? Determining age from photographs is very challenging. It is also subject to (at least) racial bias, see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culturally-rooted/202407/the-impact-of-puberty-on-racial-bias-in-black-children or many other examples. Implementing a policy that is likely to lead to racially-biased enforcement would not be a good idea in my opinion.
I also think that this:
is a pretty terrible idea, but it is teachers’ responsibility for implementing it, not iNat’s. Though I have seen a rise in the more standard “first name + five digits” username (or sometimes initials) which is good. I am also much less concerned about observation locations in schools (it is pretty obviously the default location for a student) than locations outside of schools (showing homes, travel routines, etc.).
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I’m gonna be honest, I’m not sure that adultification of non-white minors is as massive of a potential sitewide issue as the current problem that exists; allowing for folks to share the locations of minors who cannot meaningfully consent to having their pictures and timestamped locations shared online. I’m speaking from experience, it would benefit everyone if there was a way to report/hide images of minors on what are clearly school campuses. We can’t control what someone does on their own spare time (sharing locations that accidentally dox the user’s house is… an issue that needs education for teachers prior to using the internet at all tbh), but we can provide an outlet for educators/concerned people to at least reach out to a designated modding system?
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I’m a fan of the “no face reveals in observations moving forward,” concept, and utilizing the obscured locations functionality. This is such a sticky subject for a geographically massive and socially diverse website, but I like that this keeps the focus on the activity/creature/observation.
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Yeah, while I agree with lots of issues that have been brought up, and value prioritizing the safety of minors over the ability to document everything on iNat. I recognize the feasability of implementation issues and points brought up by @cthawley.
This seems like possibly the only truly enforcible suggestion so far that would make some actual headway towards preventing the concerns brought up.
I was also toying with the idea of “observations on public school property are automatically obscured”, but I don’t know enough about how that could possibly be implemented on the developer side.
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I think the difficult thing is how to enforce a “no minors in photos” policy, because there are obviously very fuzzy lines between what would and wouldn’t be deleted under that policy.
Personally, I feel like “no observations or photos where a minor (or probable minor) is the focus of the observation or photo” is kind of the best way to handle this – it’s clearly subjective, but it’s better to be explicit that it’s subjective than to say “no minors” and then have to figure out how to be completely objective about it. If there is doubt whether the individual is a minor, not much is lost by deleting the photo anyway. And specifying focus allows the obvious exceptions to a blanket “no minors/faces in photos” rule to remain on the site.
For example, hypothetically, I don’t think we’d want to delete a silly photo where a bird is standing on a toddler’s head and the observation is for the bird. Or especially a photo where a kid is just out-of-focus in the background.
There should also definitely be some kind of recourse for “observation photo is focused on a person, and that person does not want that photo to be on the website” regardless of whether the individual is a minor. A photo like that doesn’t currently break any rules, but the existence of the photo harms the goals of the website more than it helps them.
I also like the idea of blanket obscuring human observations – it doesn’t hurt the already-limited usefulness of “human” observations very much to do that, and I agree that it would be good for privacy reasons.
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That’s just ridiculous. I understand kids will be kids, and a teacher might not want to remove photos from their class project (if that’s even possible, I don’t know how the projects work).
As far as I understand though, this site and app are about identifying stuff in nature, with the added bonus of possibly contributing to science. Pictures just of people are at best harmless but wasted space, at actively insulting or creepy.
I also understand not being able to deal with the laws of every country, but if anything illegal does happen here (like the European privacy law example), I’m sure they’ll take legal action to enforce their laws.
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I think this is one of the examples where the person could (should) be cropped out of the photo. While there’s certainly some value of the photo to the person posting it (e.g. a parent’s happy memory with their child), I don’t expect people are sharing their photos on iNaturalist like its social media? A full photo could be shared with friends and family elsewhere, but doesn’t need to include the child in the iNat observation.
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People like to take pictures of themselves with their catch just as they like to take pictures of themselves next to a giant sequoia or a huge, beached sea creature. Nothing wrong with that, imo.
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I feel like this whole thread should be cross-posted to the “Educators” category.
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There is nothing wrong with it.
There is also no reason to post it on iNat.
This isn’t where your memories belong.
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Maybe they should have moderators see the photo first and then if it is actually a human it will get deleted.
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