In short, i draw a strong boundary between people choosing to obscure and auto obscure, because my take is when people are choosing to obscure, they wouldn’t have posted the data anyway. Auto obscure is forced on us from above, and makes sense in some cases, but is a very powerful and impactful thing and can be harmful if overused. I think most people obscure for privacy. If you are obscuring because you think other people shouldn’t have access to an area, it’s kind of a grey area in my mind but i am not opposed to you doing it, and have done it in limited cases before. However most of my obscuring is just because i am on private land and don’t know if the landowner wants that data shared (or else i am the landowner). Truth be told deep in my heart i don’t really think it should be legal to exclude other people from open space that isn’t near your house or business, but that’s a whole other worm hole and i don’t impose that on my obscuring. If you want to discuss further, send me a message or else make a post here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/geoprivacy-obscuring-and-auto-obscure-discussion/457 . I’m always happy to share my thoughts on this though it does make me kind of emotional and i will try to limit that :)
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