Pretty much the title. I notice most/all of my observations with private locations are simply not ID and I think its mostly because people get notified of new observations in certain locations instead of based on species etc. Is there a way to have the post/observation show up without giving away th…

unless somebody is going through based on species, it seems unlikely. but it really comes down to how people are filtering things. i often filter by species and include rg, casual and needs id, so private locations are included. for some species, location isn’t that important and in those cases, tha…

I agree with those posting that location is an important and irreplaceable part of their identification process, and I also avoid identifying Private-marked observations. I’m curious why you feel Obscured is less preferred than Private? Obscuring observations still retains some location information…

In addition to what has been said already about location being an important piece of information for IDs, I always feel a bit cautious about adding an ID to a private observation. It’s like knocking on a door that has a “do not disturb” sign on it. If something is marked private, I assume the observ…

If, you are usually going to same area? You can make a pinned location with a very much broader area - which will hopefully still provide enough info for identifiers. Without location - I usually presume it is ‘in my private garden’ or a captive exotic pet for herps.

If you feel that your observations are so sensitive that they need marked Private, maybe it’s best if you don’t upload them at all. There are TONS of clues to find out the location of such observations. This kind of thing is best kept on a personal blog…not a website where the goal is to share obser…

Every so often I see people who want to keep their observation locations hidden, but seem to feel Obscured is insufficient for their purposes, and instead stick to Private (or even keeping it Public but deliberately moving the observation location far away, with or without a huge accuracy radius). I…

Here is a snippet from the site’s help documentation / https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#geoprivacy: Private: No geographic information is shared publicly. Latitude, Longitude, and Locality Notes are completely hidden from the public (note that the timezone part of the date is still shown). S…

For private observations (and those lacking any location), I’ll often look at the other observations from the user and infer a location from those. Then with my ID, I’ll add something like “Private Location: Based on locations of observer’s other observations, presumed to be in the Southeastern Uni…

I think one major benefit of private observations is when they are used in specific projects for data collection of SAR. I personally use the private location on sensitive species that I personally can confirm the ID of, but still upload on iNaturalist for the sake of including it in the project dat…

I’ll be real. My opinion of having the option to make observations completely private on INaturalist is tantamount to buying and keeping a snow shovel in southern Florida. Is it possibly useful? Sure. But the cases where it makes sense are just so incredibly rare. Keeping it around does more harm th…

Is there any way to get more IDs on observations with private locations?

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Is there any way to get more IDs on observations with private locations?

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