I disagree that there is any “inconsistency.” iNat’s consistent principle is basically that it allows user control over what is and is not posted from their accounts within certain limits. Users can post content that meets the Terms of Use and, depending on the licenses that users select, iNat publishes it in different ways/to different partners. Users are fully informed of this datasharing. Users can also delete content from their account, in which case iNat doesn’t publish it anymore. iNat doesn’t promise or imply that users have ultimate control over their data beyond iNat, which seems (based on my reading) to be part of the objection.
I’ve looked for statements about ultimate control of data in iNat’s Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and account creation process and not found any obvious inconsistencies. The ToU states: “If You delete Content, iNaturalist will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Platform, but You acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made unavailable immediately.” Which is specific to iNat and only promises reasonable efforts.
On the forum, tiwane has noted:
That statement is pretty clearly restricted to iNat, and provides both a principle but also a legal reason for so doing. iNat is not just deleting data
which is a straw man. This is one of the reasons that information about how other websites handle account deletion is relevant: because they are subject to the same laws as iNat and working within a similar set of rules/constraints.
I don’t think either of iNat’s statements/principles above are:
You ask:
but other users have already offered several potential reasons for why users might want to delete data previously, both in this thread and elsewhere, which you do not respond to specifically or acknowledge. Just because it was possible at some point in time for someone to have accessed/downloaded data a user posted (which we shouldn’t assume is a given), doesn’t mean that deleting that specific data later has no utility for a specific poster. At a broad level there have been many court cases and laws passed worldwide in the past five years explicitly giving users the ability to delete content that they post (or even content about them that they did not! in some cases). Evidently both users and governments consider rights to control/delete data that has been posted/gathered to be quite important.
To be clear, I personally do think that there are ways to improve the way that iNat approaches users who become/want to become inactive or wish to delete some or all of their data. However, I don’t think that arguments of “inconsistency” above are valid reasons to entirely remove the options for users to delete content they post.