Post #1628341

2026-04-13 02:28 UTC

@Niall aw, damn. guess I need to drop that as well. shame, iNaturalist has a lot of potential in the citizen science contribution realm. they don't need my PII for that, though, just approximate locations.

Replies (2)

@joncounts@mastodon.nz 2026-04-13 03:11

@johannab @Niall Yes, that's a tricky one these days. iNaturalist has been declaring this at sign up for several years, because the system runs on Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS infrastructure. iNaturalist also has a grant from Amazon to host all the CC-BY photos for free on AWS, which helps to make the platform affordable to maintain through donations and philanthropic grants. (Easing the world off US Big Tech is hard.)

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@joncounts@mastodon.nz 2026-04-13 03:16

@johannab @Niall The only personal information iNaturalist collects about you is your email to validate your account. However, through your observations, you're also publicly sharing everywhere you were when you saw some cool critter. You can make those coordinates obscured or private from public view when you wish, but they're still going to be stored somewhere in iNat's US-based servers.

Open ##1628344