According to iNaturalist policy, threatened taxa (specifically taxa between “Near Threatened” and “Critically Endangered” risk assessments) are to have their geoprivacy settings set to “obscure”. This ensures that the organisms shared with iNaturalist through observations are not at risk of exploitation for trade, poaching, etc.
However, there is a caveat that sometimes puts individual populations at risk because the observations depicting them do not necessarily reach species (be it at first, or ever). For example, if an ID is attributed to a taxon of a rank greater than species (e.g. genus, family, order, etc.) the coordinates are not automatically obscured for the taxon. If there are not enough diagnostic features in the observation, it will never reach a species-level designation. However, this does not mean the observation depicts a population that is not at risk of exploitation. Poachers do not care what species of pangolin or rhinoceros is depicted within a photo as long as it is a pangolin or rhinoceros. Beyond mammals, there is a particular concern among freshwater fish taxa that are often exploited for the pet trade and beetles that are often pursued by collectors. Simply being of a coveted genus is often enough to put individuals at risk. This is problematic when only species are typically granted individual conservation statuses.
While iNaturalist curators can designate conservation statuses for taxa of ranks higher than species, this is not orchestrated on the scale that is potentially necessary and unless they are part of a well-known group (e.g. elephants, the aforementioned rhinoceroses) it is likely that these taxa will never have manually-integrated conservation statuses.
My proposal is that when all countable child taxa (e.g. not extinct taxa or hybrids) within a shared parent taxon have globally obscured geoprivacy settings, the parent taxon of those taxa is to also be automatically obscured.
For example, all living species within the genus Panthera are globally threatened with extinction and this is reflected on iNaturalist. All observations of lions, tigers, leopards, etc. are automatically obscured. However, if my proposal is integrated, the Genus Panthera itself would be obscured so that observations that are just attributed to Panthera would still be obscured. This could be conveyed on the taxon page as such:
This type of system would be applied with higher ranks as well. For example, if both Panthera and its sister genus Neofelis are obscured, than their parent taxon - the subfamily Pantherinae - would also be obscured.