Should opting out community id be void if the user is deceased?

I can see why some users chose to opt out of the community id, but what if the person passes away? I think such optings should become void since the user can no longer respond how they feel about a certain suggestion, especially if the correction occurred after their death. The best we can do is set the community id straight, but if we select that community id is as good as it can be, the observation will get demoted to casual grade.

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I think the policy is users should have ownership of their data, and this is how iNaturalist is required to comply with some regional laws as well? This has come up before and I think the conclusion was iNaturalist cannot act on behalf of a deceased user to “force” opt-in.

The best that could be done is an option somewhere where a user could select “change to opt-in after inactivity”, which probably wouldn’t be used much, but might help in some cases.

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Do you mean ownership of the user settings, including the choice for opting out?
Otherwise, I don’t see the point (the observer does not “own” IDs from others, Community Taxon, Observation Taxon).

Except if this option “change” is enabled by default.

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An opt-in after inactivity would help for users who go inactive for any reason (passing or otherwise).

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In the event of my death, my wishes are that my iNaturalist data can be changed, manipulated, or destroyed as the iNat community sees fit, preferably to be determined by endless, circular forum threads that focus on edge cases

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Is this supposed to be in “iNaturalist Next Discussion”?

As to determining if a user is deceased, this seems to be a crazy ask of iNaturalist to me. How would iNat ever know if users are deceased? This would presumably require a team of investigators worldwide to try to track whether users are living or dead. It doesn’t seem a good use of iNat resources to me.

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moved to general

If you CAN figure out if users are deceased, I think this is a potentially good idea, but in most cases I don’t think that’s going to happen.
One could infer a user’s death or at least inability to log in anymore if they were already 90+ years old and haven’t logged in in 5 years, but most of the users (and the site) are too young for that to really come up often

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There is an earlier post.
iNat will not mark an observer as deceased.
They have no ID info beyond an email address.

This was a very public passing.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/rip-stephen-thorpe/54728

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I don’t personally want to render judgment on the topic itself, but that, good sir, was an amazing response. Best laugh of the week. Magnificent structure, excellent timing, concisely got your point across; whatever one’s perspective is on this matter, that…was well done. :joy:

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Greg Lasley too.

I think iNaturalist is going to continue to respect the observer’s decision to opt out of community ID, even if the observer is dead. If the observation is stuck at a wrong ID, we can mark the observation “No, it can’t be improved.” That will make it Casual and get it out of our way. (Goes to Casual because there’s only one ID.) This is a loss of potentially useful data, but I don’t think there’s anything better we can do about it.

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I’m picturing a funeral with a stranger approaching the family: “Terribly sorry about the loss of your father, but he has a moth observation which is way out of range . . . “ Sketch comedy skit

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There are several well-known users on iNaturalist that have since passed, with public announcements being made, and adjustments were made in their profiles to entail such news. The issue here is, there is one user that I know of that automatically opted-out of community id, and it doesn’t seem right that their observations go straight to causal grade because they physically cannot reassess their reports.

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Science is always evolving. We are always wrong, but our goal is to be less wrong over time. Museum specimens are constantly being updated with new information: genetics, etc. Hundreds of years after the original collector is dead. Why should iNat be any different? Doesn’t the ID emoji represent a museum tag?

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Reasonable time of inactivity should trigger the release of opt-out of community id. Technically feasible and preserves the valuable data for posteriority. Anyone who has not “logged in” for say 12 months, most likely may not worry about what ids are doing to their life list.

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I wish there was a way to filter observations with opt-out from the Identify UI. Its not fun to do some sleuthing just to find out the user doesn’t care.

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Not logged in - but may still be reading without engaging.

@brnhn I would like Opted Out displayed alongside RG or Needs ID or Casual. And a way to ‘not see’ observers who have opted out for all their obs.

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/user-has-opted-out-of-community-taxon-observation

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/implement-a-new-filter-for-observations-that-opt-out-of-community-id/27053/18

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Actually, they do - to the extent that that they can simply delete their own observation, taking all the associated data with it. Identifiers can also delete their own IDs, but it’s not an entirely reciprocal relationship. The observation owner always has ultimate control.

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I would be interested to see a law that defines ownership like this.
(I don’t claim you are wrong).