Location data - yay or nay.

[Aoraki]

Yesterday I found a juvenile Jewelled Gecko Naultinus gemmeus. 

I stumbled onto this site when I was seeking some identification information. I was  however disappointed that an endangered species threatened by poachers had geo location data included - maybe general, maybe enough to pose an issue.

Am I being overly concerned?

Cheers

[Tony Iwane]

All observations of sensitive species have their coordinates publicly obscured on iNat: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#geoprivacy

EG: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9445299

Tony Iwane

[Reuven Martin]

You can actually remove time entirely - just delete it, and it will successfully save with just the date.

On Tuesday, November 6, 2018 at 2:07:57 PM UTC-5, Chris Vynbos wrote:

Tony can we consider obscuring the time of day as well? I tend to put up easily 100 obs+ for a day's hike, so my track is very obvious, and it is easy to work out where my obscured obs is located by looking at the time stamp and the surrounding unobscured obs. So I change the time to midnight on sensitive obs to prevent giving too much away. 

[Reuven Martin]

Chris, the time and date metadata is stripped for obscured photos, as far as I can tell

On Tuesday, November 6, 2018 at 2:59:55 PM UTC-5, Chris Vynbos wrote:

True, but either way, it stays on the photo's metadata, visible to all, so currently one has to delete the time from the photo(s) metadata before uploading.

[Chris Cheatle]

Guys, it is generally thought of as best to not openly give hints on location 'hacks' here, perhaps removing these comments is best. There is nothing new here the inat team is not well aware of.

[Chris Vynbos]

@Chris Cheatle, if we are raising an known problem it is odd that it hasn't been fixed. I've deleted my comments but I will email them to the team. 

[Mark Tutty]

Maybe we are interfering in a sting operation... they know about the vulnerability, and have police there waiting to nab the poachers! Shhh!

 

cheers
Mark Tutty
kiwif...@gmail.com

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[Chris Cheatle]

No, just short of obscuring every observation, there will always be tricks, just no need to advertise them in my view.

[Charlie Hohn]

If you know the tricks you can generally figure out ways of subverting most of them without sacrificing data quality. I have some work arounds that work pretty well (though i won't post them for obvious reasons). And in the end if something is REALLY a risk, consider not posting it here or anywhere else for that matter. if there's a reputable Natural Heritage Inventory let them know,but no one else. 

I wish there were more real studies on how much these things happen. Maybe a honey pot with a game cam?

On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 9:43 PM Chris Cheatle <cmch...@gmail.com> wrote:

No, just short of obscuring every observation, there will always be tricks, just no need to advertise them in my view.

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Charlie Hohn
Montpelier, Vermont

[jdmore]

Aoraki,

Maybe this wasn't your situation, but just be aware, when you are logged in as an iNaturalist user, coordinates of your own observations will always be visible to you unobscured, but will still be obscured to other users if it is a system-obscured species.  And if you are not sure, you can always manually obscure location for any of your own observations, which will override the system.

On Tuesday, November 6, 2018 at 8:59:34 AM UTC-8, Aoraki wrote:

[Simon]

Thanks. It wasnt clear which is why i raised my query

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