I do not know that to be true, but I do know that @tiwane said the following in this thread:
That was why I suggested fleshing out what I presumed to be the start of an idea more fully.
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Not contradictory with the following (and consistent with a separation of actions):
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Right, yes, I understand that to be the favored well; I was merely pointing out his most recent statement, and that if one wanted the kernel of an idea one had proferred to be assessed for feasibility, one might do well to flesh it out more fully. That is all.
Subsequent posts made it feel instead that one of the two action tracks you suggested perhaps was not meant to be utilized at all and was perhaps meant to be as obstructive as possible in design, which would be the opposite of my best practice but would fall in line with best practice utilized by large corporations. (Think of trying to quit a cell phone contract.)
As I said above, I am not the person to design iNat policy but the questioning practice I outlined above will assist those who may have an interest in developing and then assessing their own idea among the myriad of ideas that pop up during these brainstormy discussions.
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I was actually thinking of professional biologists and amateur experts, who can help sort out the tough IDs that field guide keys can’t resolve, or are familiar with the most recent research that isn’t in the field guides, or are knowledgeable/wise enough to know when an ID can’t be resolved down to species. Sometimes, you have to look at the various field marks together with an open mind and see where the majority point, while simultaneously factoring in range and phenology (vs following a linear key). In an ideal world, you’d have several experts hash out these tricky IDs in the comments so that the less experienced folks who are interested in the taxa in question can learn this process. But how many of these experts are going to have the time to do this? And if the few that are willing/able to do this are driven away by assorted unspecified frustrations, you end up having discussions like this one.
Even if iNat finds a way to preserve the work of the experts that are leaving, iNat will still be losing their potential future contributions. And after leaving, they will tell their colleagues about their bad experiences, making it progressively less likely that other experts will join. Bad reputations eventually take on a life of their own, and can be difficult to dispel. That should be the primary concern, but I will concede that it’s a good idea to offer the option of preserving data for cases where there are no clouds hanging over an iNatter’s departure. I think putting road blocks in the way of data deletion is likely to backfire.
But hey, fill your boots.
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iNat is a community that shares and discusses observations, and data are generated from that sharing and those discussions. In some ways it’s analogous to a museum, but in other ways it’s not.
At this point, no. Best would be to share your wishes with a trusted friend or family member. Our lawyers have told us that confirming a deceased person owned a specific account is beyond our capabilities.
Certainly possible, but I see a lot of speculation about motivations in this thread, which is a bit of the opposite of what we’re supposed to be doing on iNat. The truth is that we (collectively) don’t know what caused each person to not only stop using iNat but to take the step of deleting their account. And as I mentioned previously, in the instances where I do know someone’s motivation, the motivations have been quite diverse and in some cases pretty unpredictable, IMO. I’m for adding an optional “tell us why” box for account deletion, but that will potentially greatly increase our database size. There are always trade-offs.
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So, maybe we should start when people are still alive to verify they’re who they say they are?
So does this mean that even if I “willed” my account (by name) to iNaturalist upon my death, iNaturalist would be unable to accept ownership of the account? Would some kind of accompanying sworn affidavit of ownership maybe help?
It was @tiwane , I think, who pointed out that the iNaturalist staff is already very busy and doesn’t have time to reprogram iNaturalist in ways that would keep the identifications made by a person who deletes his/her account. I believe that’s true. However, inserting a human into the process of deletion (a human volunteer) might make keeping those identifications practical. I’ve thought about the time it would take, and I would volunteer to be one of the people who does this. I imagine others here would, too.
Process as I envision it? Note that I assume deletions are not common.
Preliminary: Make an announcement to all iNatters that from now on (or from some future date on) ID’s will be retained when a person deletes the account.
At the time of deletion: Account is suspended. (Process for that already exists.) Help Desk (Sorry, but I can’t think who else would always be available) changes the password and makes the account available to the volunteers. This should take very little of the Help Desk’s time, once the process is set up.
Volunteer actions: Open the account. If # of ID’s = 0, delete account; end of process.
If # of ID’s >0, edit. Change user name to something like “Self-deleted-user2003-1-25-003.” (Enter into a spreadsheet, for internal iNaturalist use only, the new and original names.) Change e-mail address to something generic, following a pattern that iNaturalist has agreed on. (Nobody will ever use that e-mail.) Then go through and delete all observations, journal posts, list, etc. Change notifications so nothing will show up on the dashboard that nobody will look at anyway. I think notifications already received are automatically deleted after some period of time. If so, nothing to do about that. If not, a bit of programming would be useful, or we just abandon them. Don’t worry about followers. Done. Close the account and don’t look at it again.
If there are lots and lots of observations to delete, the process would be slow, even with bulk editing and 100 observations/page. However, I recently spent a few days identifying Daucus carota observations on iNaturalist; I think I could cope with this (and presumably others could, too). Assuming deletions aren’t very common, that is.
If the number of ID’s is very low, just create a new account with the new username and e-mail as above, and go through and enter the new ID’s, then delete the original account.
Who would these volunteers be? A limited number of the people who have been doing ID’s or curation for iNaturalist for a while would be asked/encouraged to do this.
I care about building the database of what’s where when for use by researchers. Therefore, I think that keeping the ID’s of people who delete their accounts is important. We can do this, working together.
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Hi @sedgequeen! I see a few extremely minor "And then what?" areas in your well thought out idea. May I put them forth or would you rather I not? (I offer to do so to be helpful not obstructive.)
I’ve heard people admit they started off with multiple accounts, and then subsequently realized this isn’t permitted, so they contacted help@inaturalist and iNat staff merged their accounts into one. I can’t guess how labor intensive this is for the staff member, but it does tell me the process exists already in some way or another. What if the IDs of deleted users just went to a mass account named something like “deleted_users”? You’d loose all ability to guess which ID came from which user, but is that really important at such a time?
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I very much like this idea of changing the account name, but remember each account also has an ID number, and it is possible (perhaps uncommon, but possible) for other users to know that number, and to have it in a bookmark or whatnot. Therefore anonymity might not be complete.
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That can be changed too probably.
This is already happening and is one of my big questions for those who think they can delete their data entirely. iNat regularly exports data to a global data repository that is designed to share data amongst researchers and other interested parties. Once the data is exported to GBIF or downloaded directly, it is available for separate use and storage by non-iNat actors. There is also the potential for individual pages to be stored on the internet archive (www.arhive.org). This has always been the flaw in “I was to control my data” argument.
With regard to the deletion of IDs and comments, that leads to the potential deterioration of other peoples’ contributions to iNat if the deleting party is the only ID (or worse, as noted a couple of times above, the deleting party is the expert IDer). Without speculating on the reasons for someone to leave iNat, the impact be can wide-ranging to both individual contributors and other iNat participants. I wonder if people deleting their accounts understand the implications of the action.
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Thanks, Tony, glad you agree that this might be a good way forward. I agree that there are always some trade-offs, but in this case, it would seem that the biggest trade-off would be the time and effort it would take to read the motivations, classify them somehow, and devise some sort of response to the issues raised. In terms of database size, a few hundred words takes up less space, surely, than a single blurry photo of a Mallard? I appreciate that dealing with this issue could take staff time away from responding to other feature requests and improvements, but hopefully there would be substantial overlap between issues important enough to prompt people to leave iNaturalist, and issues which continue to be important to those of us who don’t.
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GBIF will delete everything if you delete it from iNat, so there’s no problem with control over own content.
I’m OK learning more! I’ve already figured out that changing the e-mail is maybe the hardest issue. I think as currently set up that needs a response from the current e-mail account. It needs to be done right at the beginning so the person doesn’t get e-mails about the other changes going on.
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The gaping hole is that the iNat API allows download of obs, id and comments by anyone, not just GBIF, and those downloaders might not be so accommodating about deleting the data of others. The cat is already out of the bag.
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By NO means do I think you will learn anything from me, so please set your expectations low. I just think your idea is really good and deserved filling out if you wanted. I really like how you took into account consideration for the Staff’s current workflow and utilized knowledgeable volunteers.
Here were my questions, which maybe are already answered if @arboretum_amy’s suggestion of the one mass “deleted_user” account is utilized:
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What should happen to that person’s username? Should it be retired permanently so nobody can “spoof” them? Reserved somewhere in case they decide to return someday?
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What should happen to the “Leaderboards” and other data points, especially if a conglomeration account was formed by multiple accounts merging into one “deleted_user” account? If something new, what needs to be designed?
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Should identifications that are visible but no longer able to be retracted or explained by the parties that made them carry the same weight as identifications that are not anonymous and can be retracted/changed or explained? If not, what system needs to be designed?
In my opinion, it would be good to retire usernames for, say, six months whenever an account is deleted. However, that’s a separate issue so I decided to ignore it. Not a problem we need to fix as part of this suggestion.
I envision keeping an account for each deleted user. I think that would be the simplest, in terms of the process. Making it possible to merge these accounts would probably require more programming, and each bit of programming required would make it less likely iNaturalist would agree to this.
I think that naming the new accounts some variation on “deleted user” would alert people to the inability to change. We could put a standard paragraph on each profile page about this. I think we shouldn’t change the weight given to these identifications – it would add to needed programming and the ID’s are as good (or bad) as they ever were.
My concept is to keep the process as simple as possible – use existing methods. I figure we the community can deal with problems like deleted users not being able to change ID’s. This is minor compared to the problem of loosing all of a person’s ID’s.
Strongly agree. Digital data preservation and the amount of loss that often comes from it is a very important issue to me. So much so that I regularly back up websites that are in danger of closing or shutting down to the Internet Archive. Some people on iNat are working on scales similar to 19th and 18th century taxonomists and zoologists, and if any of those people delete their accounts for one reason or another; that data would be permanently lost.
Having an anonymization feature would be great, as there may even be people who wish to delete their accounts but are hesitant to do so due to the damage it may cause to many people’s observations.
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