Windows doesn’t wait to send you a security update until 10% of people have been hit by a bug or security flaw that allows a new attack vector. iNaturalist shouldn’t either.
It’s good that they’re being proactive. I certainly welcome the update, even if it’s a bit frustrating (yes, I’m curious where someone saw that unusual plant), but I’d hope that people here would want to put the interests of nature and the environment above their own personal preference for ease or comfort, especially when it affects the latter to such a small degree.
No, the previous geographic-only means were not sufficient. It was pretty easy before to figure out via interpolation. This, at the very least, potentially adds larger error bars on any interpolative process.
That might be the case for certain species, but I don’t think it’s a general rule. Many people do not realize that they’re posting something rare or vulnerable. They just want to know what it is or thought “hey, that’s pretty”. Outside of a handful of people, hardly anyone knows what Haller’s Apple Moss is nor that it’s endangered; to them it’s just a moss. The same is true for most other endangered species There’s about 100 species obscured for Canada and as someone with less-than-expert, more-than-average knowledge, I maybe recognize 20% and of those most I didn’t realize how vulnerable they are. Occasionally users on the more casual end of the spectrum will find something really rare and interesting. (That’s one of the things that makes the platform and IDing extra fun and exciting from time-to-time!) A platform needs to cater to that lowest common denominator of expertise, especially with regard to privacy and security.
There was another site that I once frequented that was used by a wide range of users. I, along with another user, discovered a security flaw that revealed individuals’ locations with good precision. That site failed to strip EXIF data from their photos, and users tend to post photos from within their homes often. The average user is blissfully unaware how this can reveal one’s location or home address. (This was the reason why my first concern here was what happens to EXIF data on photos which are uploaded on iNat.) What I found on that other site was that forum posters, the 1% of that community, tended to dismiss the issue saying, “Well everyone should know that! If they don’t want the info out there, they should have stripped it in advance” … But the reality is that not everyone knows their photo contains GPS coordinates. The issue affected about half of the accounts that had posted photos. I doubt that most of them realized. My takeaway was that you really need to examine what a typical user knows and does rather than the more expert ones with whom you probably associate more often (either users you follow or those on the forum).
As for what species are covered, this isn’t the place to discuss. But I’d like to point you to something else: I’ve been generally really pleased with the approach of iNaturalist Canada on this front. See: Updates to taxon geoprivacy and conservation statuses in Canada. I haven’t seen other countries discuss their taxon privacy lists on the forum, so perhaps they should model their approach after that of the Canadian team. Maybe one of the staff or moderators could set up a separate wiki thread for that topic at some point.