I hid some posts that broadend the scope of the discussion to areas that I think aren’t a good fit for the iNaturalist Forum. Discussing privacy issues with iNaturalist is fine, but forms of population control, etc., is out of scope.
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I have seen news stories lately about people detained by ICE who were actually in the country legally.
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Yep. Best to bury the ownership of your shack in the woods in a series of LLCs and Trusts.
All I have right now is a VPN that allows me to switch servers within and outside of the US.
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The issue isn’t the photos you take, but the location you take them from. They can give away your home or places you frequent, and even if obscured can show when you’re out of the country or otherwise travelling.
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I agree. There are several techniques that might defeat obscuration, and their effectiveness will partly depend on why an observation is being obscured, but the actual translation of a precise location to an obscured one is fairly effective. If we imagine two users posting obscured observations from two different locations within the same 0.2×0.2-degree box, there should be no significant difference between the distribution of the two users’ obscured observations.
Nevertheless, it’s pretty sad that we’re now having to offer the same types of guidance to iNat users in the US that previously were mostly limited to people living under authoritarian regimes or fear of stalkers.
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In the US, given that the beneficial owner of an LLC is obligated to file a BOI form (beneficial owner information), the LLC hides nothing. Failure to file could cost you hundreds of dollars a day, and failure to use your real ID and address subjects you to perjury risks.
And given that your tax forms have your full ID and address, and are shared with the government, with DOGE, and likely with China (OPM hack) and probably Russia now, you’re definitely outed!
You can probably still lease a safe house with cash, so the answer is: file no iNat observations made at your safe house! And don’t file observations in the same place and time as anyone else who might be a person of interest and whose associates might become of interest!
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Your initial suggestions are quite good. One approach that can be helpful is not uploading observations in real time, or not making the location information public in real time. The longer the lag, the less useful the information should be for surveillance. E.g. don’t make locations near your home, your job, your commute, your kids’ schools, or your frequented places public before those facts about your life expire. Of course sometimes immigration control or some other instance might still be interested in your historical whereabouts and that’s when you’d just need to be aware of the risks yourself, if that was something that did or might affect you.
Every day I grow more grateful that I live in the middle of nowhere, with a billion look alikes with the same name.
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