Not knowing what, if anything, is actually going to be implemented, my understanding is that there would be two pieces to this.
- personal date geoprivacy at the choice of the user (opt-in)
- automatic date geoprivacy when obscured taxon geoprivacy exists for any of the taxa observed by the user on that day
Speaking just as another iNatter, I 100% agree here, especially for the involuntary piece. I can maybe see the argument that it’s a necessary part of robust taxon geoprivacy for species super vulnerable to public knowledge of locations. Problem is, most of the species currently with obscured taxon geoprivacy do not rise to that level. Either that needs to be cleaned up first, or date geoprivacy needs to be a separate setting on conservation statuses that gets locked down to a much shorter list of critically vulnerable species – those for which ne’er-do-wells would go the extra mile to analyze daily observation patterns.
Otherwise, if a bunch of my non-vulnerable observations are going to be involuntarily obscured, just because I happened to also see a critically vulnerable taxon that day, I probably wouldn’t be alone in the temptation to either fudge the date of the vulnerable observation to prevent that from happening, or just not post the vulnerable observation at all.
I would much rather see this option implemented:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/option-to-hide-time-show-just-the-date/4469