Where in that message you quote do I suggest you are at all? I am talking about the removal of private locations, which you do seem to be advocating for, not obscured ones.
Wow, that’s totally understandable. I’m mostly dealing with researchers looking for info and samples of things that are infrequently or rarely observed. I forget that there are others that are dealing with massive amounts of data. In that case my suggestion isn’t helpful to you. 
I’m curious why you think concealing those types of locations would be of benefit. Why would anyone care?
That was the old mission statement. It has been revised.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about
This page, which says “Revised on August 12, 2026” at the bottom, currently has the text
Mission
To connect people to nature and advance biodiversity science and conservation.
on it, in those words exactly.
Why do you think this is so important? What specific issues are you trying to address?
If you’re worried about infrastructure, the storage costs are largely borne by Amazon via their Open Data Sponsorship Program, rather than by iNaturalist itself.
Also, the existing code already catches the “error” and automatically marks the observation as casual. This effectively eliminates the observation from most contexts, unless the user chooses to override the defaults, or applies other filtering options. So the impact on the community is generally quite minimal.
iNaturalist has deliberately chosen a very open policy with regard to data-inclusion, and this certainly does have some negative consequences. But missing dates, locations and media are already adequately handled by the existing DQA mechanisms.
So anyone who’s serious about trying to change any of this would need to specify some clear benefits, and explain how the proposed changes would do a better job of upholding the site’s core technology principles.
Another reason to upload observations without any location is because, say, your phone glitched and didn’t record the location data for that photo. This happened to me just now, so it’s not a hypothetical!
The reason I went ahead and uploaded those observations without a location is because I find it much easier to add locations using the website on my laptop than using the app on my phone. There’s even a feature that will automatically calculate the location based on surrounding observations!
In this case, if the app refused to upload the observation without a location, it would make it harder to add the location, which seems the opposite of the intended effect.
Another reason to upload observations without any location is because, say, your phone glitched and didn’t record the location data for that photo. This happened to me just now, so it’s not a hypothetical!
And that’s accidental. Sanity checking code should catch the glitch and prompt for input of the location.
Accidents happen. Checking should prevent them from continuing.
No, it’s not, as made clear in the second and third paragraphs.
It’s the observer’s intentional choice to go ahead and upload, in spite of the camera glitch, because adding the location later is easier that way. Different people have different workflows.
First of all I assume he is speaking in generalizations, trying to help people grasp a concept rather than writing a letter-of-the-law comment. However, based on
I assume he is expressing an interest in concealing his usual walking routes so as to not be stalked by users looking for his whereabouts. Knowing a user’s regular patterns allows someone to know exactly when that person is away from home, increasing the risk of burglary or whatever intent someone might have. It also exposes them to potential sketchy situations in isolated areas, like a quiet park trail. As he said an individual with bad intentions could easily deduce a user’s daily schedule like the specific hour and path they take to walk their dog. That being said no one is forcing anyone to care. Do what you think is best for yourself of course.
And again, this is so people with malicious intend wouldn’t know your location if that was worrying for you.
Some people have more reason to be worried about such things, if they cannot conceal they wouldn’t be able to as actively participate as well on iNat. Why limit that for purely minor convenience reasons of the identifier?
Um, both the web uploader and (I believe) the Next app do in fact notify users when there is missing information from an observation they are attempting to upload.
It does have something that notifies the person making the observation, actually. But someone might think “oh, dang, my phone didn’t properly save the location data, but I’m in the middle of doing something- I’ll upload this without a location and then go fix it in a bit”. And then they can go fix it later.
Can in theory, but in a significant number of cases never do. Hence a significant part of the problem with observations without coordinates.
Simple solution. Force the user to enter coordinates at the point of creation. Stops ALL of those issues from occurring. Does not impede people’s use of the site in a significant manner.
Oh there are those who will and have in this thread complain about “different workflows”. My view is and always will be: tough. Data integrity and identifiable observations are more important than those “different workflows”. Those different workflows inherently allow the creation of observations that can never be identified, whereas alternative and perfectly usable workflows do not suffer from this problem. Hence, to my mind, those different workflows need to be stopped in their tracks.
It is clear that I will not win the day. So data quality suffers from easily avoidable problems. So more observations end up never being identifiable and thus of extremely limited or not use.
Obscuration of extant coordinates has its uses. Not having coordinates in the first place simply creates unnecessary problems.
What “data quality” is suffering if these never get exported to GBIF or used for research in any way due to being casual grade? Who is this creating “unnecessary problems” for? Again, any observation without coordinates is hidden from public view in both the Explore and Identify pages. People upload an unfathomable number of benign photos to the internet every day. I really don’t get what the issue is here
iNaturalist’s data quality.
The data quality that matters most for this site. The one that determines its usefulness. The one that determines its reputation.
I really don’t get what the issue is here
Indeed. Dealing with a conceptual framework problem like that is a vastly harder problem than discussing things within the same conceptual framework.
That is why these are “Casual Grade”! Those are exactly the posts that do not meet iNaturalist’s data quality thresholds for research, and are not part of the exported dataset! Complaining about the data quality of those is like eating your napkin at a Michelin-starred restaurant and then complaining about the taste!
This is a very pessimistic view. The observations missed for legitimate user errors involving location is very small. For all you can leave a polite message to the maker requesting an adjustment. If they don’t, so what? Some value lowering the barrier to entry to capture more engagement, hoping the community can help clean up the data later. It’s a minimal trade-off between total data volume/accessibility and super strict data perfection.
I don’t really think anyone is or should be thinking about this in a “win the argument” scenario; this is a discussion post with the intention of addressing different problems. Most people cannot see why what you are talking about is actually a large or well-defined problem. Don’t get me wrong though, I get your point – to an extent. In technicality data quality suffers when coordinates are skipped, but when is this such a big deal? Sure, it rarely can be, but even then it is so specific that if contacting the user, which almost always works, doesn’t for some reason, just move on.
Forcing people to put a location would lead to incorrect locations being put, like where they are posting it from instead of where it was observed. This would actually cause issues with data quality! An observations with no location doesn’t have inaccurate data, just the lack of data. An observation with the incorrect data obviously has incorrect data.
I wasn’t insane. It wasn’t an accident. I knew the location was missing. (The app warned me that the location was missing.)
The only thing forcing me to enter the location in the app would do is make it more difficult for me to enter the location. Making it more difficult to enter the location does not improve data quality. (In fact it would encourage people to half-ass the location, which reduces data quality. People would absolutely just submit it using the location of wherever they are when they discover this problem.)
And? Worst-case scenario, it stays casual forever. Casual observations aren’t affecting data quality.
You don’t improve data quality by focusing on observations that are already being automatically sorted into the “don’t affect data quality” bin.