If you think that obscuring is not enough, you could post it with a different date and location, and post it a couple weeks later. That way even an advanced hacker wouldn’t know where it was exactly.
That pretty much turns the observation into bad data. I’ve obscured observations and used a very coarse precision radius that includes but is not centred on the actual observation but for something like a spotted turtle (which poachers are hell bent on eradicating in the wild, it seems) i wouldn’t post an observation from a previously unknown population at all, for the reasons alluded to by others.
I do have a quibble with terminology. Poachers are not ecotourists. The sort of idiot that uproots rare things and takes them home as trophies has been around since apes climbed down out of trees and started traipsing around the savannah on their hind appendages, long before ecotourism was a concept.
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i don’t see how this helps anyone. why do you think posting bad information is better than posting nothing at all?
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Maybe they didn’t, but here’s a story that may prove they did. I live near Medellin, Colombia, in a gated community. Within the community we have about 20 hectares of protected forest. A few weeks ago, while I was in the United States, two men came to the front gate of the community and said they were coming to visit me. They used my iNat user name to identify me. Since it includes my last name, the guard texted me. He knew I was out of the country. He wanted to know if someone was coming to my house while I was away, especially since one of the men was clearly a foreigner speaking English and I have lots of friends who visit from out of the country. I was not expecting anyone. I asked him to find out who they were and why they were there. When he asked for ID and told them I was not around, they said I had agreed to let them come into the community to look at something in the forest. The guard said this was not the case. The Spanish-speaking man pulled down his hat over his face (I know this from the security camera) and the other said never mind and turned away. A few minutes later, they were seen on a different security camera climbing through the barbed wire fence. The guard went and chased them away. We have the license plate number and one of their faces and have turned it over to the local police. I doubt anything will come of it. But if you are questioning if this actually happens, it does. If I do get a name, either for the iNat person or some local nature guide, I will definitely share.
Since I am the one person posting regularly to iNat from this location, and since I have to assume it was my posts that drew someone here and enticed them to trespass into a private, protected area. My photos on insta have zero location data.
Yes, I could hide my location, but that is less helpful to people who do research and track what’s around here. I hate knowing that unscrupulous people are exploiting our contributions.
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As observations saturate the obscured grid, the grid itself becomes visible and in some cases one can probably figure out a specific location based on this. If you want to visualize the obscuring grid, just check out Marine Iguanas in the Galapagos (I only share because they’re already reasonably protected). Given that these animals are near-shore and one can reasonably exclude the ocean as basking sites, where some of these sites occur is pretty apparent, especially when the grid only encompasses a small sliver of suitable habitat (land).
Also one on the little island off the coast of Ecuador. That was cautiously uploaded a month later - hopefully the iguana had long since moved back to the others.
The grid boundaries are public - 0.2 x 0.2 degrees I believe. For aquatic/terrestrial organisms where only a small piece of suitable habitat is contained in a given grid, it is indeed not difficult to infer a location. Users can choose to make their observations private or not post at all if a location is too sensitive.
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OK, I have no idea what was going on there, but clearly these people were pretty motivated to enter the place where you live without good cause. How they ended up at the gate, we don’t know, but your guess is certainly one possibility.
Most of the time, that type of behavior is motivated by something of significant rarity or value. And if you’re posting stuff of that sort on iNat, it would definitely seem to be a good candidate for an obscured location.
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I’ve seen the results of orchids growing legs, illegal collection is a problem.
Poaching and smuggling goes on despite heavy penalties.
Cultivate the rare plants and sell legally, get it into capable botanic gardens who can propagate them further. With enough living specimens around, the price will drop and the poaching business case is destroyed.
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