I just saw a user’s comment that indicated a wish that in the event of death all of that person’s content stay on the iNaturalist site. What automatically does happen to the content on the site if a user passes away?

as far as I know, nothing happens to the content, except that sometimes family members will delete accounts without knowing that the original user would not want it deleted.

A few earlier threads. Not dead, but deleted accounts and obs and IDs unhappen https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/the-vanishing-of-a-fellow-inatter/38221 https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/dealing-with-account-deletion/93 https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/handling-top-identifier-status-for-deceased-inat…

Check other topics about accounts after death, nothing happens, but for some law reasons you also can’t make the account frozen or something.

[image] sdz456: a wish that in the event of death all of that person’s content stay on the iNaturalist site. Since this question comes up fairly frequently, and likely will even more as time passes, I wonder if iNat and its attorney(s) would be willing to answer some basic questions: As a …

Some relevant info from a previous feature request: [image] Deceased observers - and a deceased symbol on their icon Alright, after some discussions with our legal counsel, we’ve decided that it’s too difficult for us to verify that a deceased person is actually the owner of a specific account (…

Surely it would be simple (legally and procedurally) for iNaturalist to provide an option to prevent an account from being removed. I mean, for the user to state that the account must not be removed no matter what. iNaturalist wouldn’t have to curate or manage it, just leave it alone like any othe…

[image] ydobon: as far as I know, nothing happens to the content, except that sometimes family members will delete accounts without knowing that the original user would not want it deleted. It seems to me this scenario could be easily solved by having a setting that users could set, asking th…

As staff said, it’s not possible for legal reasons, it’s not as easy to prove you own the account.

This makes no sense if the user specifies their wishes up-front, when they still are alive, which is what I was suggesting. If you can’t trust that the person controls their account to begin with, then there are more serious problems here, because iNaturalist is publishing all sorts of legally-rele…

It makes sense and they did contact the lawyer for that, there’s too much room for possible errors and bad things happening, iNat doesn’t want such problems in the future, your account after your death is practically frozen.

Users' Content After Death

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Personal statement in Profile, does it weight? General	8	511	November 7, 2023
In the event death or incapacity General question	39	1629	June 22, 2024
If a significant Inaturalist contributor dies General	15	1318	October 15, 2022
Can we have an In Memoriam iNat page? General	13	1429	April 2, 2026
Deceased observers - and a deceased symbol on their icon Feature Requests	68	10857	April 17, 2019

Users' Content After Death

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