I recently read an article about the surveillance that a contractor for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carries out to scrape the data of private individuals from public sites such as social media, music streaming and chat apps, even GitHub, and use it to map people’s movements and relationships – including so that they can arrest and deport individuals on flimsy pretexts. I’m sure that most people are somewhat uncomfortable with this, to the extent they are aware of it.
Neither iNaturalist nor Discourse are on the list, but presumably they could easily be added in the future. We post a lot of information about where we’ve been through our observations.
My questions are:
What legal or technical recourse does iNaturalist have to prevent such scraping of user data ahead of time?
How can individuals on iNaturalist best protect themselves from unwanted surveillance, other than not using their real name?
Might such intrusive surveillance have implications for the open sharing of biodiversity data as we enter a more dystopian political era?
In your replies, please do not post anything that could be used against you. I’d also ask that you focus on the discussion points above and not wider political questions.
A few thoughts on my second question:
Don’t use your real name if you’d prefer not to be surveilled online
Don’t put links to your other online accounts in your profiles
Don’t include identifying information such as email addresses in your profile
Avoid profile photos that show your face or that you use in other accounts
This is a great question and one that’s been on my mind lately. The war on science is becoming fiercer and I worry for fellow academics, naturalists, and anyone else committed to truths that dogmatic governments and greedy billionaires don’t want to hear. In practice, though, I don’t think there’s a reliable way to minimize the threat that sharing information on iNat poses without reducing the volume or resolution of data shared in the first place. I would love to be proven wrong!
Another question I’ve had is whether iNat can implement systems to stop images from being scraped to train generative algorithms. I imagine that if this isn’t already being done to iNat it won’t be long before it is, and the internet is already flooded with terrible and inaccurate pictures of organisms generated by computers.
The whole point of public data, is that they are public. I cannot image a system where data would be available to researchers while also being out of reach of the governement.
Ultimately, it comes down to only putting information online that you are comfortable with being public.
There are two useful things that iNaturalist could do:
On the account sign-up page, advise people not to use their real names (or at least warn them that their username and associated data are completely public).
Purge all server access logs after 30 days. These logs associate IP addresses with usernames and can be subpoenaed or requested by governments or law enforcement agencies to associate anonymous usernames with real people. If you think this isn’t important, there are people who have literally been executed in places like Iran, Syria, Belarus, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia based on server logs revealing their identities.
It is, unfortunately, an inherently risky action to be regularly posting your physical location the way we do here. For most of us, at least currently, the risk is reasonably low, but if you are in a higher-risk category you should take some precautions.
Here are some possibilities to consider. Please note, none of these are foolproof if someone is really looking for you specifically, but it could help you avoid the more generalized surveillance.
Don’t use your real name. If you currently do, and you’re really worried about it, it is probably better to create a new account and simply switch - your old profile with name attached is likely archived online in various places.
Don’t take observations near your place of work or residence. If you do, be sure you obscure them, but if you take too many it is still pretty obvious where the center point of the obscured observation box is.
Delay your uploads by a month or so, so the info you’re providing is at least not your immediate current whereabouts.
Be really careful about joining identity-based iNat projects. The LGBTQ iNaturalists group is great if you live somewhere civilized, but there are many places where it could put you in serious danger (this is an important one to remember if you travel a lot, too - in some countries merely being a member would be considered evidence of an actual crime).
Try not to create habits in the days or times you visit particular areas. This is a good safety tip in general for other parts of your life, also.
On further reflection, satellite-based imaging improves every day, so even if you live off-grid in a shack in the woods, various people and organizations can still track you, build a virtual profile of you, and do various unsavoury things with it.
As we have seen, “somewhere civilized” doesn’t always remain so. There have been various times and places where modern, progressive countries have been taken over by a backward-looking regime.
Getting back to the original point:
If you know or have connections with people who are undocumented, it’s best not to say so anywhere online. This has always been true. A bigger concern is if a policy is put into place that would rescind the legal status of someone who previously had it. By then, there wouldn’t be much to be done about it after the fact.
As you mentioned, there probably isn’t any way to minimize the threat if one is a published researcher. It would be nearly impossible to get one’s published research pulled from all platforms like Academia, JSTOR, ResearchGate, PubMed, and so on. These research papers usually state what institution the authors are affiliated with; it would be easy to find out which publications were the most recent and take that institution as a likely location.
Just my thoughts, not based on any knowledge of law or computer wizardry.
Pretty much none. Public info and posts are available to anyone. If I can click on your profile and see it, anyone can. For non public info, it can probably be legally attained with a warrant, or through being sold to data brokers (I don’t know if inat does this or not, but a lot of places do). If someone wants to get your data without legal authority, rules wouldn’t stop them anyway.
If someone is really targeting you specifically, inat is the least of your worries. Social media, phone gps, credit card activity, and who knows what else will reveal way more than a site for nature enthusiasts.
I think jasonhernandez said it pretty well. I will add, research is only valuable if it available to others in some way to make use of. It’s either available online, to data miners of varying legality, or it isn’t online at all.
In conclusion, we’re all doomed, don’t worry about it. Just try to make your little sphere of influence a little bit better, have a beer, and enjoy life as best you can.
I don’t think this is true. “Obscured observations display the 0.2 x 0.2 degree rectangular cell encompassing the hidden true coordinates. At the latitude of San Francisco, this cell has an area of around 400 km2.” https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/geoprivacy
This cell does not appear to be centered on your true location, because of course that would give the game away.
If you’re on the run from the law for any reason, you’re probably best off just ditching any electronic devices that can connect to internet/cell service. It’s no secret that law enforcement uses electronic tracking methods to track people down, that’s been a thing for a while now
I don’t think this has anything to do with being on the run from the law. There are lots of law-abiding people in the world that have legitimate reasons to avoid government surveillance, and that list gets longer every day. (And for anyone that thinks that’s a paranoid outlook, just read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI–King_letter or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO .) Also, I don’t think ditching all electronic devices is a realistic option for most people these days.
That’s not how the obscured box works. They are preset squares. Most of my obscured obs are in this box: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=30.61&nelng=-94.19&place_id=any&subview=map&swlat=30.39&swlng=-94.41&verifiable=any I tinkered with the lat/long until I found the edges, because the nature preserve that I curate the project for is inside this box. There are auto-obscured species of plants at the preserve, but still we want the observations in the project because they are not rare at that location. The preserve is nowhere near the center of the box. And not all my obscured obs within this box are from that preserve. Multiple preserves and private properties that I iNat at are in the same box.
It seemed that’s what the original question referred to, specifically immigration law. I do agree that surveillance of law-abiding citizens is a major concern though. As is scraping user’s personal data to sell to advertisers. There are ways you can increase your privacy online, especially from advertisers (for example using Linux, vpn’s and the like) but it would be very hard to circumvent all the tracking tools law enforcement has at their disposal without completely ditching the Internet/cell phones
Given their necessity in today’s world for everything from communications to house-searching and putting in job applications, that’s easier said then done especially in the long term. Expecting undocumented people to live relatively normal lives while also forgoing technology for years on end sounds unreasonable in my opinion.
That being said, just because someone values privacy doesn’t mean that they have something to hide or have committed a crime. At one point, privacy was the norm.
as others have noted, the center of the obscuration box doesn’t help to reveal the true location of its observations. that said, if your life or safety depends on it, iNat’s obscuration feature is not going to protect your true location – not from a lone bad actor with the right knowledge and skills, let alone from a government who wants to find where you are.
Any site not on a VPN is available to crawlers to collect content.
Any agency of any government and their contractors, big corporations, amateur and sponsored hackers, organised crime, robber barons and their dogs collect big data.