I make a fair amount of observations at and around my home, I would prefer if my exact address wasn’t known to everyone. Should I mark my observations as obscured or open with 2km accuracy and my residence inside the 2km bubble?
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I use obscured for this because I still want to be able to mark where things are on the property.
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I use obscured for observations around my home.
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Pinned location works too
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/elephant-s-eye-on-false-bay
So far, none of the ‘random’ pins has landed here.
I personally use a 2 km bubble which includes my house as that makes the locality for the observation much more accurate and potentially useful for research compared to the 24 or so km uncertainty for obscured points
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Agree with using the 2 km circle. Obscured locations are contrary to many of the purposes of iNaturalist and should only be used when really necessary imo.
I use a pinned location with an accuracy circle of ca 500 m not centered on my residence – basically the city district. I chose this over the obscuration setting for a couple of reasons:
It keeps all observations from my residence on the same point on the map; I might observe the same individual or the same population repeatedly and it would bother me to have them scattered across the 25 km grid box.
I live in an apartment in a city that is somewhat smaller than the obscuration box, meaning that obscured observations might end up being placed in a field somewhere. I am interested in urban nature and I feel like valuable habitat information would be lost or at least made less accessible if I obscured.
I do a lot of observing within walking distance of my home/work. In other words, if I were worried enough about my privacy to obscure observations made at my residence, I would also probably need to obscure a large percentage of my other observations, because collectively they provide a fairly good picture of where I spend a lot of my time.
So for me personally, a not-too-specific pinned location seemed like the best option. But I don’t think there is anything wrong with obscuring if it fits your needs better. One thing that may be relevant here is that the obscure function not only obscures the location but also the date and time. So if you are concerned about it being possible to draw conclusions about your habits based on your observations (times when you are home – or not at home), obscuring offers some distinct advantages over a large accuracy circle.
Also note that obscuring means that the true location is stored on iNat, which means that it may be accessible under certain circumstances – e.g., if you “trust” other users with the true coordinates, or if you are affiliated with one of the national network partners; or, involuntarily if users manage to exploit some back-door access.
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I changed all my observations made in my or my parents’ place to “obscured” after watching a documentary about cyber-bullying. For iNat purposes, I have regretted that choice ever since, since I now cannot easily filter for observations in that place and the map is absolutely scattered with my obscured observations.
As I’m now no longer on any other platform apart from iNaturalist (and only semi-active on BlueSky, where I use a different name), I’m probably gonna change it back again.
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I self-obscure by using a 250m radius, which encloses my entire neighborhood. It’s not centered on my house, but the center of the 'hood. The circle is small enough, I guess, that someone could track me down if they wanted to go door to door and ask, but doesn’t put an immediate X over my house.
I chose to do this because my subdivision is on top of a hill, with slightly different habitat from places around us.
I don’t obscure often in iNaturalist because it makes searching for my observations troublesome, and in this area of Texas, it really obscures the habitat the organism is in. I find it helpful to look at the map and see, “Ah, I was close to the creek for this observation, but up on top of the hill for this other one.” I like to do this when identifying other people’s observations, so I allow it in return. I think I’ve officially obscured less than 12 observations of my 13,000+, all for poach-worthy organisms.
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This is essentially what I do and my reasoning as well, though I set my pinned location and accuracy circle to 499m just in case someone is using a 500m accuracy filter for their data.
As a researcher, I’d much rather have 500m accuracy for a point than an obscured point. But YMMV with housing density whereever you are. If someone is in a dense housing area, a smaller accuracy circle may be sufficient. If in a rural area, even a 2 km radius might not be sufficient. But in reasonably dense housing areas, I think this approach probably maximizes usage of the data and privacy/protection.
I post a lot of moths at my house. I formerly obscured the location, but in the past few years I’ve switched to using a 1499m pinned location. (Similar to above, I want to keep it under 1.5km.) The main reason I switched is because I want the exact date to be visible. Flight date ranges are very important for moths. If you obscure, people will see “May 2025” instead of May 2, 2025.
The one drawback here is that if I ever move away, I would like to unobscure the observations at my house. It would be easy to do that with the old obscured ones. I could just change them to open, but it would be harder with the pinned locations because the real location is not saved.
One other thing - if you use the open pinned location, don’t forget to strip latitude and longitude from the photo’s metadata (if your camera records this information). People can still see the photo metadata on an open observation even if you set the observation’s location bubble somewhere else.
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I move my home observations off my property, within accepted limits, and in “suitable area”. The obscured settings too often puts them in weird places (dry area that "should be " wet for example) or on private property. (Which would upset me if someone was doing that with pointing to my private property.
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