The vanishing of a fellow iNatter

[anon93074988]

Thanks for this, it’s truly appreciated. While we may not agree it’s good to have the conversation. There may be some light amongst all the heat.

@tiwane

iNaturalist will always allow users to entirely delete their content from the site, both as a matter of principle and because laws like GDPR would not allows us retain data by users who no longer want us to.

Yes I am aware of this. However this is a continuing sticking point - you appear to be conflating personal data (which GDPR covers) and data in general (which is explicitly out of GDPR’s scope.) I have indicated the difference in previous posts, and will do so once again. Here’s its definition:

“‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person”

So I don’t believe GDPR is forcing you to delete all the other non-personal data such as observations, identifications, etc. Data anonymisation/pseudonymisation (including obfuscation of data such as obs location) provide well-established solutions to the PII situation you find yourselves in. These are not novel - they are well-understood and already widely applied across the IT industry. And no, I Am Not A Lawyer but I have experience in tech, data and avoiding getting sued over the pat 30 years.

@cthawley

which is a straw man

Mea culpa. I liked its pithiness.

@cthawley

I don’t think either of iNat’s statements/principles above are:

unrealistic, unachievable

My opinion is on the basis that GDPR doesn’t apply if you fix the data in such a way that removes the personal information (as above, anonymise/pseudonymise/obfuscate). If you remove that legal basis, you are left with a principle that you have decided upon and will live up to it in terms of your own servers, and quite narrowly in terms of its effect. I suppose that’s fine, achievable and realistic although it doesn’t strike me as very useful, and it seems quite Pyrrhic in nature. Still, that’s up to you and I’ll stop banging on about it

@cthawley

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.

iNat, not other users, are the arbiters of the functionality of the system, which is why I tend to focus my messages to iNat’s representatives. Also I assume other users are more than capable of positively or negatively responding to my posts to the iNat team. And if they do, I will respond. Granted, I have seen a couple of other users saying things like “we want to be able to delete our own data so we support the feature remaining” but a) I don’t consider that a good reason; b) my responses would probably not survive moderation, and c) I honestly can’t recall any others. But perhaps I just haven’t been looking hard enough. I will endeavour to do so to in the future avoid further aspersions that I am singling out official iNat people for opprobrium.

@cthawley

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.

Once again, both the links you provided were about personal data. As above, anonymise/pseudomyise/obfuscate the PII data, keep the non-PII data and the problem goes away. That straw man is certainly taking a beating today…

@cthawley

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.

I agree - I don’t believe inconsistency is a good reason to remove the ability to delete. It’s was just an incidental observation.

As I have said here and in other threads I believe the main reasons why the data shouldn’t be deleted are because of the impacts on data integrity, data completeness and preservation of the body of knowledge.

Am I being super-altruistic? Not entirely although I do think those things are very important in terms of platform trust. I also know that some time in the future a deletion will result in yet another mess to clean up.

And yes you can argue that being able to delete data is a pro-trust issue too - I don’t envy the iNat product managers, but it’s good to provide them alternative perspectives, and perhaps some hard-won advice.

Thanks again!