Observation indicating both open and obscured

Under details it says open, yet the Obscured icon is showing.It should be open.

Because it is my observation, not sure which is taking precedence.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/37995245

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It looks like LTDU has been set to obscured globally?! Not sure if this is an automated process at some point, or if a curator made this decision.

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Long-tailed duck is listed by IUCN as vulnerable globally, so all observations are obscured. When something is auto-obscured it will say “public” to you because that’s what you set it as, but you are being overruled and others will not see your exact locations (although I think if you “trust” another user with your locations they can see the location for this observation, others obscured by the system, as well as any you may have manually obscured).

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Something has gone wrong / changed then, The lower level of geography is supposed to take precedence in terms of deciding what the obscuring is.

This taxa is defined as open in the province of Ontario. I am virtually certain until just recently there was no problem seeing these locations (it is a very common duck in the province and we went through a painful long process of negotiating which species did not need to be obscured in Canada)

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@cmcheatle No, I’m quite sure that “open” statuses at one geographic level have never overridden “obscured” statuses at any other level. Back when we were first starting to go through the Canada statuses, I had to remove global obscuring statuses off some species (off the top of my head this includes Imperial Moth) in order that they would be open in the relevant province.

Long-tailed Duck has been newly set to obscured - not sure why. Thread here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/common-birds-being-newly-set-to-obscured-recently/9753

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Also, the original discrepancy is normal. The text “Geoprivacy:” indicates how the use has manually set the geoprivacy, regardless of any status set for the taxon. The icon shows whether the observation is actually obscured on the map. Maybe this could be made clearer.

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Then why is the last edited date on the taxa page for LTDU showing as December 6th ?

And it for sure takes precedence the other way around, for example Eastern Foxsnake is set as Open in Canada, Obscured in Ontario (putting aside the stupidity that the species only occurs in Ontario in Canada), and the lower level takes precedence, records are obscured in Ontario.

As far as I can tell, when changes are made in the database, rather than manually on the website, that text isn’t updated. You’ll notice that a lot of species won’t have any text showing when they were updated, because all changes have been made through automated processes by inat staff.

In this case I’m still not quite sure what’s going on. I don’t know what change I would have made on December 6th, and in any case it’s clearly been updated in the past couple of days to be unobscured (maybe by me, don’t entirely remember). So something is funky with that page right now.

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The level is irrelevant here, I suspect the algorithm used for obscuring doesn’t even “know” that Ontario is a child of Canada. If ANY encompassing place is set to private, the observation will be private. Otherwise, if ANY encompassing place is set to obscured, the observation will be obscured. Otherwise, the location will be open.

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I fear you are correct, as is usually the case. It appears to be a design choice (intentional or otherwise). Vancouver Island Marmot is listed as open in both Canada and BC, but obscured globally and sure enough the records are obscured.

It kind of renders adding records at lower levels of geography where there is no need to obscure a moot point if they are going to be overridden by records higher in the geography, especially automated bulk imports.

I would equally question the need for the default setting for near threatened species to be obscured, more serious states, perhaps so. I guess the onus remains on determining which taxa can be open even if they have NT status.

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https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/date-taxon-last-edited-does-not-always-reflect-the-correct-user/5405 (bug)

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I think the correct response here is that taxa shouldn’t be obscured at a higher level if all the jurisdictions it is found already have statuses. This is the case in Canada now - every single species is now (in theory) set to open for Canada, because the lower-level lists are complete.

So the marmot (which occurs only in BC) should never be set to obscured in Canada or globally. And if (for example) a species has been approved to be unobscured in a Canadian state and province, I don’t think curators should have any hesitation in setting it to open globally.

The bulk uploads is a little annoying, but it is fairly quick and easy to fix. I fixed all the Ontario birds in about 3 minutes this morning.