Sorry, I don’t understand. There isn’t a way iNat can automatically prevent people from posting photos of humans without serious unintended side effects.
iNat policy:
flagged photos depicting humans should be hidden
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Yes we should just accept any unintended side effects that the current guidelines may cause. Chances are we won’t hear of the harm it may do, so I’ll close my eyes and ears to those possibilities.
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With respect to flagged photos of humans being hidden there are multiple photos that have shirtless kids and similar inappropriate photos that aren’t getting hidden and flags being closed.
Too many observations of humans aren’t appropriate for Inat, but it is difficult to draw a concise line.
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if you encounter someone that is not currently following the new policy, file a ticket at help.inaturalist.org for staff to take a look
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It’s hard to be sure who has consented and who hasn’t. Moreover, people may have consented to being photographed but, at the time the picture was taken, they didn’t know that it would later be posted on iNat.
The link provided earlier showed a boy who appeared to be trying to block the photo. It is fair to assume he didn’t consent. But what about the people in photos of, for example, dead oarfish on the beach? They are clearly posing with the corpse and aware that they are being photographed.
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Flag those and the IDs and photos should be hidden.
I’m sorry this happened to you. Best thing would be to flag the photo as inappropriate so it can be hidden (which is more protected than something being flagged for copyright infringement)
I agree they could be handled better, but the devil is in the details. As others have pointed out, there are a lot of reasons a photo is OK, and a lot of ways a more harsh system could be ripe for abuse.
If anyone thinks a photo is being used for harassment, they can flag it and it will likely be hidden. The burden is then on the observer to appeal. I’ve hidden many photos where someone has been identified as a non-human (whether an inside joke or an insult, often hard to tell, but we err on the side of caution).
To be clear, Homo sapiens observations are casual grade due more to irrelevance-to-iNat than whether they are considered wild or not.
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The referenced pictures apparently violate above bullet points 2-5. If that is true, then they should be removed.
It seems that currently the way this works is that someone has to flag the picture, then a staff member has to review it and make the decision. This leaves a lot of opportunity to overlook violating pictures.
I usually roll my eyes whenever I hear about anything to do with AI, but considering the volume of pictures currently and regularly uploaded, this might be a necessary step to address the issue.
I know it isn’t my place to suggest how the owners/moderators manage their business, but I would hate to see inat get into legal trouble over this. Better to address it before then.
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Why the reluctance to mask/ blur all human faces?
Age, consent, recognition no longer an issue.
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I would agree with this. In addition to “hands and feet”, I occasionally have included a human next to a large tree, either deliberately for scale or because I was with a group and to have to wait until everyone cleared the site would have meant that I would be very delayed. If possible, I wait until the human’s back is turned to me. In any event it is not my intention to have an identifiable human in the image and if that was the case, I would/will be very happy to obscure their face.
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then - all photos of human faces - could be hidden by default. The sheer volume of, was it 130K obs, which would need one identifier to go thru and flag, and then a curator to go thru and hide. Ain’t nobodies got time for that. Going thru to retrieve and unhide on request should be an infinitely smaller volume of work for humans. Especially if the guidelines could move to - iNat used to allow photos of human faces, but in May 2025 we updated our guidelines - see this thread. ?
Hands, accidental feet, or ‘faceless’ human for scale are relevant to iNat.
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How do you expect this to happen? AI? How do you suggest to deal with the countless false positives that will suddenly become a major problem?
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I like the suggestion of automatically obscuring the location (taxon geoprivacy) for all observations with a community ID of human. I can’t think of any disadvantages to doing so and it seems like it would add a bit of additional protection for people who might not have given consent for their photo to be posted. This would be as a supplement to existing measures like being able to flag photos or other potential measures such as obscuring faces.
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IDed as Homo sapiens.
Pictures are hidden.
If there are
? Presuming it is the same bunch of kids who treat iNat as a game. They can be warned, and suspended.
I see obs of humans with joke IDs. Obs of nature IDed as humans out of malice or as a joke - haven’t met that.
I can see some value in obs of Not Wild, of Cultivated plants or Captive animals. No one offers the value in obs of people for iNat’s goal of engaging with nature. As tiwane said - irrelevant!
With facial recognition technology out there. What if the child has been moved to a new school in a new town to escape an abusive situation.
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Adding to this, and to the concerns of “griefing”, should obs IDed ad humans be automatically obscured, leading to people maliciously spamming obs with a human ID in order to cause mischief: surely something could be implemented where “if obs X gets a sudden influx of Homo sapiens IDs, flag for moderator review”. Or maybe any and all obs that get a human ID are flagged for manual review. Offer users a big warning if uploading an observation as Homo sapiens, and offer a similar warning if suggesting that ID to someone else’s observation. Some sort of “hey, [random photos of humans] isn’t what this platform is for, are you sure you wish to proceed?” message for the former, and a “if you’re found to be abusing the community taxon feature, your account will be suspended and your IP address logged” for the latter. I know the IP address thing is pretty meaningless, but I think it would spook enough people (especially grade schoolers) into compliance, heh.
Regardless of how this issue is tackled, it’s a lot of thankless work for someone. Either relying on the goodwill of the community to be proactive and report misuse of the platform, or relying on moderators to manually check every single Homo sapiens observation, or relying on an AI to solve this for us which will inevitably need human beings to monitor the AI to make sure it’s not erroneously flagging things… it’s a pickle for sure. I do strongly agree that something needs to be done. But what? Well, I guess that’s what this thread is for.
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If someone wanted to do this, there are already plenty of other existing species available with obscured taxon geoprivacy that could be used. And like any other deliberately false IDs, they would likely be quickly noticed and flagged, and curators would then hide the IDs (and possibly suspend the identifier).
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Good point! I was mostly just exploring the “okay, so what about griefers?” line of thinking, as I’ve seen it brought up to (seemingly) support the argument of “do nothing about this issue”.
Still, I wish there were easy answers. :P
TBF that does sound simpler. I had the impression you wanted to have the face in the picture automatically blurred.
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That was my idea to automatically blur faces. I don’t know how difficult it might be to implement though.
There is an existing open Feature Request for this here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/automatically-obscure-observations-marked-as-human/501
And I’ve re-opened the corresponding taxon flag here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/378758
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And the source of conflict there is that those can have innocent intent. A family day at the beach, for example, where they are likely to be in swimsuits. A family at the beach is unilikely to be thinking in terms of “semi-nude children” in that context.
But given that this thread is about human observations in schools, I think that @bouteloua has given us the definitive answer:
An image like the one Diana described, where the subject is clearly objecting to being photographed, looks like a clear-cut case.
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