Identifications deemed to be intentionally inaccurate, for any reason, should be hidden. When hiding the identification, write a note stating your interpretation of why the intentionally inaccurate identification was made.
Common motivations for intentionally inaccurate IDs:
Retribution for perceived or real slights or misidentifications
Insults or hate speech, such as identifying a photo of a human as something insulting, racist, or sexist
Joke identifications, such as wildly inaccurate or silly identifications
Hiding an identification will remove it from public view and inactivate it - it won’t count toward the observation’s Community Taxon. Wrong identifications that are made in good faith should not be hidden.
This has been the policy for a while now, since hiding IDs/comments was available.
And photos of a human in combination with an insulting comment/ID should be hidden as well. I should probably update this to “in combination with an insulting comment or intentionally false ID”.
Images being used to bully or harass someone, such as a photo in combination with an insulting comment or ID
OK, then it seems that – at least in the case of obvious misuse (whether as a “joke” or maliciously) rather than more general questions of consent to having one’s photo posted – part of the problem is not a lack of mechanisms for dealing with it, but a failure of enforcement.
How do we increase awareness among curators that they should be hiding such content rather than resolving flags? (I assume that not all curators read the forum, and also that they may not necessarily see updates to the curator guidelines.)
Edit: In the case above “Apes and Old World Monkeys” is not technically an “intentionally inaccurate ID” in the sense of iNat’s taxonomy, since the parvorder includes humans. However, this does not mean it was not intended as a mis-ID – the intent is clearly to call the person in the photo an ape or monkey, because otherwise they would have chosen Homo sapiens. Users unfamiliar with taxonomy who are relying on the common names may not even be aware that humans are within this taxon. So a certain amount of sensitivity to the spirit of the guidelines rather than the letter seems to be called for.
Regarding the potentially offensive use of the genus “Homo” without the “sapiens” part, I agree that this is tricky. One thing that might perhaps help would for the CV to be programmed to always suggest the species in this particular case instead of its usual more conservative genus-level top suggestion. Then at least there might be less ambiguity about whether such IDs are intentional or the accidental result of testing how iNat works.
I left a link to this Forum thread on my flags yesterday - and was successful in getting both the joke / malicious IDs and photos hidden.
Also - one curator left a polite warning.
I mean, sure, I wouldn’t want to be presented as something bad. I just can’t see the problem with having my face blurred if the same thing is happening with every human face (as distinct from singling me out for some specific purpose).
Now if there was a policy to blur every human face and mine was left unblurred, thereby indicating that I wasn’t considered human, that would be different! :-)
if human faces were blurred in future. You could flag your pictures - please UNblur this face - it is mine. But how will the curator know if it is your face? A note with the obs - the face is mine!
There are 80 pages worth of observations marked at Genus Homo.
44 observations met the definition of Inappropriate(mainly intentional mis-ID’s and racist/sexist comments, but one depicted nudity and one was of human remains from a massacre).
15 observations of copyright infringement
And I was being very “generous” when it came to Inappropriate. Preferably 60% of those observations could be removed since they are just photos of people. Only some were of value(prehistoric human and hominid evidence, etc.)
If the “generous” 2% inappropriate rate of observations hold up for human observations we are looking at over 2700 flags. That is a huge burden on curators and flaggers alike.
I don’t see any harm in just blurring the faces of humans in any observation with the identification of Homo sapiens or Homo.
And blurring and obscuring license plates as well.
It is also fair to prevent iNat from having an additional workload of moderation for social interaction since it’s not a platform with ads incomes nor whose goal is to rely on more social interaction and its inevitable negative side.
To keep things on point and cheap… why bother at all with human obs? Isn’t the whole point of iNat to allow us to interact with nature* instead of interacting with humans and their evidence?
Of course, we can find uses for them. For instance, I’m a diver and I could upload litter as human evidence in remote protected areas. But, again, there are already dedicated platforms for that. Why use iNat servers for that?
Kids will be kids, but kids are provided with iNat a wonderful way to interact with nature in a different way: which isn’t about identifying humans as humans. It would also ease the work of curators.
‘* I know humans are part of nature… but this isn’t what iNat is for.
People, seemingly mostly high school students, are having their pictures posted in ways which seem offensive or without consent.
As pointed out by yayemaster, there are lots of pictures in violation of inat policy, including nudity, that have yet to be hidden, and won’t be without manual intervention.
This has the potential to get inat into serious legal trouble.
Regarding the proposed solution of a universal face blurring policy, this makes sense for the following reasons.
It would automatically be done with the use of AI, possibly as an extension of the existing computer vision. So no need for moderators to either sort through thousands of pictures or wait for flagging.
It would be unconditional. If it were dependent on conditions such as consent or age, that would make it dependent on the interpretation of the moderator, require manually checking every picture, and opens up the possibility for misinterpretation. It’s safer legally to apply it universally.
This one is more of an opinion, but it may help keep the site/app more focused on the goal of observing nature. While it doesn’t hurt to have people in a picture, some examples have been given which seem more appropriate for social media. The example of a guy holding up a fish he caught, in the absence of other photos focused on trying to ID the fish, is really better for facebook.
While Inat does have policy against offensive pictures, it seems to only be enforced when somone first finds, and then flags an offending post. Since that doesn’t seem to be happening reliably, it seems to be unlikely to give any protection in a legal battle. It also fails to protect the interests of those whose pictures were posted without consent or with offensive labeling or location information.
The consequences of blurring the image of someone who is fine with it being posted are far less than the potential consequences of doing nothing to hide the offensive ones.
I disagree. These are generally fairly large fish, the sorts that would be caught on a hook, and they are usually identifiable, at least to genus. You can hold it in yout hands for a photo or you can lay it out on the ground.
We can back and forth this hypothetical case of the fisherman’s face, or we could come to a reasonable new set of guidelines on what to do with the growing pile of human face photos, the looming possible legalities and the fact that iNat is NOT for photos of humans.
I don’t like the idea of blurring human faces in observations. However . . . .
it could be done automatically, since software exists to detect faces.
it would likely discourage the posting of photos with human faces.
it usually wouldn’t detract from the usefulness of other parts of the photo.
it would reduce the “fun” of mislabeling photos of real people.
it might keep iNaturalist out of legal trouble.
it could be implemented with a mechanism to override this upon request.*
it would allow me to keep the observation of the Giant Fly of Obrien.
Yes, request would have to be justified, somehow.
So all in all, I consider this the least bad, least intrusive suggestion.