Hi,
I saw that the exact date of an observation can be seen on GBIF, even if it is obscured in iNaturalist.
Example:
Links removed by moderator
Does this make sense or can this be even seen as a bug?
Best,
Christoph
1 Like
I would guess the observer did not initially obscure the observation, and it was sent to GBIF. Later, they obscured it, but that hasn’t had time to update on GBIF yet.
it’s not a bug. currently, there is only very rudimentary protection for dates on obscured observations. locations are better protected, but that protection is not complete on any obscured observation either. so if you need to protect any of your observations completely, the best thing is to not post the observation at all.
2 Likes
Thank you for the information. Even if it is not a bug, this seems like something that can be fixed/improved quite easy.
To give the users the choice to obscure information on iNaturalist but publish it on GBIF is somehow misleading.
1 Like
Yes, this is not a bug. “Rounding” of date to month in the display is intended to make it more difficult to infer the date/time of the observation, but there are multiple ways that this information can be determined to different extents. It’s definitely not an absolute protection. I disagree that the documentation is misleading myself - it clearly says that obscuration isn’t perfect and that users should consider not posting very sensitive observations at all.
One way that users can prevent this particular outcome is by not posting an observation to GBIF if they so choose by changing their license.
On a side note, I’ve removed the links in the original post since they show the location of an obscured observation that isn’t the OPs (even though it is publicly available with a bit of work, we still shouldn’t do this on the forum).
1 Like