Just for the record: If you pick obscured or private, of course also all GPS related metadata in the photos will be hidden, not just the location of the observation.
So apart from the special case I described in my post, EXIF data usually does not pose an additional geoprivacy threat.
Otherwise, the biggest privacy concern related to EXIF that comes to mind, is that you can make some guess about a users wealth by their very expensive camera gear.
But you can always strip the metadata from your pictures if you want. There is a myriad of tools. And if you do it for all photos in bulk it doesn’t take long.
On many photography sites, such as Flickr, all or parts of the EXIF gets published alongside the photo. Here an excerpt of the FAQs:
How is EXIF data used for photos uploaded to Flickr?
Showing your EXIF data will allow those admiring your photos to learn about the camera, lens, aperture, and other settings that were used. Your EXIF data also contains date of capture information that is used to organize your content by date taken.
Apart from photography reasons, I use the EXIF data for
- knowing if a photo was taken using flash (relevant e.g. for bugs, where you want to know if they are naturally that shiny or just under flash) → possibly ID relevant
- photo order and timely separation: With EXIF, you can see the exact second a photo was taken and determine e.g. if one picture in an observation was taken 30min later then the others. This ofc has many usecases.
- estimating the distance to a subject based on size of subject in the frame and the focal length. Often with bird photos, I look at the focal length to see if somebody just has an insane tele or managed to get really close.
- seeing if a photo was edited e.g. using photoshop via the Software Tag: It’s not bad to upload color enhanced photos to iNat but sometimes it’s good to know that the colors dont look that vibrant IRL.
- When I got into birds in flight, I looked at some observations’ EXIF to see what settings they use in different conditions for BiF, to learn from it
Also in EXIF you can store custom tags and when you write descriptions to your photos, I think iNat automatically imports those as the observation description by default, which can be useful. (Ofc you can delete than before uploading.)
Right now, metadata is only viewable using the little “i” on a picture and there is no API endpoint. I actually made a small web extension to show parts of the metadata right below its respective image for convenience. It also automatically computes the offset of the photo to the observation time (“+1”, “+30min” etc) so you can easily see the order.
I think iNat should continue to store and show EXIF data. I would even love a “camera survey” where they show the top 100 cameras used for birds, insects etc. Would be very interesting also for people looking to buy a new camera.