Fluid Anonymity

We all feel different levels of vulnerability depending on the seasons of our lives and our own personal circumstances. When my kids were young and I first started leaving them home alone for short periods of time, I felt more vulnerable than I do now. Consequently, I had my at-home observations obscured. Later, when I wanted to convince online strangers to join my umbrella, I revealed more about myself and my project.

But what if I had regrets? Second thoughts about having revealed myself? What if, after revealing myself, I wanted to return to anonymity? Somehow, I'd have to undo all the "open" observations I've made at home. In my case this would be easy. I already have a "place" for my home project. I can search for all of my "open" observations in that "place" and set them all to "obscured" via batch edit (and then subsequently delete the "place"). But what if I had added them all to a traditional project without an associated "place"? In that case, It would require an additional step but it's still pretty easy.

On the "Explore" page, I can key in my street name and adjust the size of the search area to include observations from my lot and the surrounding neighborhood.

Once the box is re-sized to include all the observations I'd like to include, I can cut and paste the coordinates of the search box from the URL for use on the "Search" for batch edit. Here is the URL for the re-sized search area in the picture above...
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=39.06549813937679&nelng=-84.34833807526574&place_id=any&subview=map&swlat=39.063041720189155&swlng=-84.35116478188147&verifiable=any

The URL includes...
nelat (Northeast Latitude): 39.06549813937679
nelng (Northeast Longitude): -84.34833807526574
swlat (Southwest Latitude): 39.063041720189155
swlng (Southwest Longitude): -84.35116478188147

If you click "Edit Observations" followed by "Search", the following drop-down is revealed. The four coordinates can be pasted into the appropriate text boxes circled below.

If you then select "Open" from the Geoprivacy drop-down.

Click the "Search" button at the bottom of the "Search" tab. Any observations that remain "open" within this specific search area are revealed. If you only have a couple observations, you can edit them individually. If you have a great many observations, the "Batch Edit" functionality allows you to select ALL of them at once and move them all to "obscured". This functionality allows for fluid anonymity... setting all our at-home observations to and from obscured and open as we each navigate the changing seasons of our lives. I wouldn't advise changing back and forth all the time just for fun. It's probably somewhat "expensive" (from a data processing perspective on the server side) to provide this functionality.

The point is... I don't want to feel like this umbrella is inadvertently encouraging people to reveal more than they are comfortable revealing. I don't think this is the case. But if you find yourself waking up in the night and worrying about someone sneaking onto your lot and digging up your Asarum, just change your at-home opens to at-home obscureds. And if you have trouble doing this... just drop me a line. ~ @stockslager

*** I might start aging journal posts after a period of time for a similar reason. I sometimes quote from the information people provide in their profiles when introducing new projects. When people change their profile descriptions, there is the possibility of their old verbiage still existing in my old journal posts. If I age them, they won't feel trapped in what might be an out-of-date profile description.

Posted on December 12, 2023 05:01 PM by stockslager