It clearly said it was a general comment and was not in reply to any of your text.
I’m open to alternative suggestions explaining as to why it should be made more difficult for users who are manually choosing to obscure observations to actually do it and have it work.
I think it should be “reasonably” easy to obscure observations, and it should definitely work. I agree so much so that I’ve campaigned to have obscured observations excluded from our project, precisely so that they will remain obscured.
But by making it too easy, I’m concerned that many observations that do not need to be obscured will be obscured by naïve observers. Most of these observations will be of little value from a scientific perspective anyways, but occasionally, casual observers do stumble on interesting finds. And just because something is interesting doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be kept secret. Sometimes, interesting finds should be trumpeted from the rooftops.
Maybe there needs to be some kind of warning like “Are you sure you really need to obscure your observations?”. I would bet that many who do, don’t.
What basis is there to assume this ?
When I look at the list of records in Ontario that have been manually obscured and look at it in terms of who is doing it, the list is dominated by either professional or government biologists or high end amateur field naturalists.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?geoprivacy=obscured&place_id=6883&view=observers
They are obscuring it because they are tired of going back to locations and finding things have disappeared or significant habitat damage etc, and know that because of the unresolved holes in the current system obscuring simply 1 record is effectively meaningless and can be defeated in a couple of seconds.
Or posting things, rare or otherwise from private property and then hearing back from the landowner for whom they were doing the survey that people are trespassing taking the iNat post as a green light to go hiking or exploring there.
Would be cool to check statistics, I id things and most obscured ones I see are from new users with less than 20 obs.
Plus many seem to be confused by wording of current system when it asks about obscuration.
That’s an interesting exercise. I just tried it in my neck of the woods, and here a considerable number of the top obscurers have quite different reasons to do so.
None of that really matters. Observers don’t owe identifiers to provide them with unobscured observations, and identifiers don’t owe observers their attention.
Obscuring should work for those who wish to do it. Excluding obscured observations from projects, or identify queries is the appropriate response for those who don’t wish to deal with obscured observations.
I think that sums it up in a nutshell.
And I should add that I’m also an active observer. You might not know it because I don’t submit my observations via iNat, because it’s too time consuming to do so. I haven’t even had time to cull my own photos or enter my observations into a spreadsheet since early July. But my observations do end up in the Ontario Butterfly Atlas eventually, so I have to contend with some of the same concerns about whether or not I should obscure locations of rare species.
How does one exclude obscured observations from an Identify search? I’ve been looking for that.
URL parameters: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?geoprivacy=open
(with values: open, obscured, private, any)
it may be worth noting there’s a separate taxon_geoprivacy parameter. so if you wanted to exclude both observer-obscured and taxon-obscured observations, you would need to use both parameters, i think.
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