[Shalomboy]

My first eye-opening moment working within the government was with team of herpetologists at the state conservation agency. They had a pretty slick public education campaign around protecting Gopher Tortoise habitats and a grand call-to-action "let the agency know where and when they see their nests". The whole thing fell apart because they were getting tons of earnestly-submitted junk data from earnestly-engaged citizens. Turns out the application was just a form that they asked people to fill out. I suggested they ask for user photos and scrape the EXIF data or ask them to opt-into sending their location and got laughed out of the room. Turns out that they discovered users immediately nope out of government websites that ask for their location! What a shame.

[MostlyStable]

A colleague of mine tried doing this after a large sturgeon die off in the San Francisco Bay a few years ago. Citizens were asked to upload photos of dead sturgeon washed up on beaches. They actually got pretty good data (sturgeon are very easily identifiable) and lots of participation, but the location data ending up being largely useless because it was fuzzed (I think by iOS?) to a large enough degree to no longer be helpful, and the fields for manual coordinate entry had very low usage

[Shalomboy]

Oh that's fascinating. I hadn't considered OS-level fuzzing as a hurdle until now. I'm an pixel guy and typically I get decently-accurate location heatmaps in the Photos app when I search by location; I wonder how we would have handled this. HABs are so difficult, they break my heart.

[Barbing]

How does iOS decide whether to default to including location?

I coulda sworn, even in earlier versions of iOS 26, if you told it not to include location when sending a photo once then it would not include it by default the next time.

Also I thought that when you uploaded a photo from your camera roll to the web I thought it defaulted to no location. And that seems to have changed too. (Of course, you can still tap a button to withhold location EXIF.)

[smelendez]

I wonder if there would be any way to fix this with the right messaging. With infinite funding and the right agency cooperation, I bet you could include this in a state parks app that you could also use for other useful purposes, like pulling up trail maps, paying for parking and camping, fishing licensing, signing up for volunteer events, receiving notifications with news around particular parks you frequent, etc.

But in the real world, if you put a QR code at the trailhead and said "take a picture of this code. When you see a tortoise nest, use the code to go to our website and share your exact location."

If people are wary of sharing their location with the conservation agency, you might have better luck if the website was run by a nongovernmental conservation group?

[Shalomboy]

> I bet you could include this in a state parks app that you could also use for other useful purposes, like pulling up trail maps, paying for parking and camping, fishing licensing, signing up for volunteer events, receiving notifications with news around particular parks you frequent, etc.

I wanted us to do this so badly; inter-agency coordination was the biggest issue with I had with large-scale projects. The funny part about your comment is that each feature you listed was a function that a different agency or contractor handled. I won't name names, but the agency I worked for had better-than-expected public outreach and engagement and were organizationally flexible enough to get low-footprint, high-impact conservation PR like this out the door and in front of people in time to make a difference. But in state government, the idea of several agencies pooling resources for a permanent app store project is totally pie-in-the-sky thinking largely because nobody has the bandwidth to contribute. I'm trying to imagine submitting a PR to 'The State Parks App' org board to get this form shipped and in every instance, I'm getting yelled at.

> If people are wary of sharing their location with the conservation agency, you might have better luck if the website was run by a nongovernmental conservation group?

Our NGO partners were incredible for this sort of thing. People legitimately do not think twice about pinging a facebook group run by, say, the local aquarium and including their location, a description of the site, and photos of what they found. Social media removes a lot of metadata from uploads - they probably keep it someplace and I just can't get at it without a brokerage, idk - but it still gets better results than we did. One fix for the tortoise problem was to supply personal trail maps and golf pencils at trail heads. Hikers were encouraged to take them, mark on the map where they saw burrows along the trail, and put them in a box at the end of the trail/parking lot/ranger station. Park rangers would scan in the maps and upload the scans to our internal site and we would work it out from there.

[latexr]

> earnestly-submitted junk data from earnestly-engaged citizens.

What made the data junk? Were the provided coordinates not precise enough, incorrect, something else?

[Shalomboy]

Well that's just it - in most of the submissions the coordinates weren't supplied at all, and when any location information was given it would come down to just a city name or a park name. They're trying to pipe these results into ArcGIS to inform park rangers where to reroute trails, public works departments where to survey before digging, and real estate developers which lots need proper relocation assistance before building on. They were depending on the average citizen to know how to fill out a technical field in this form and to do so accurately, and without and form validation. The whole project needed re-thinking.

[mapmeld]

Sounds like a combination of 'can it be geocoded?' and 'is their location precise enough?' There is some progress on resolving human-written locations in cities ( https://www.danvk.org/2026/03/08/oldnyc-updates.html ) but I imagine once you lose reference points, '100 feet into Golden Gate Park...' would be interpretable but not possible to fix to one point.

[Shalomboy]

You're absolutely right. Highways are a little better since they have mile markers, but once you get into a nature preserve you're dealing with a whole bunch of "If you pass the pond with the cattails on your left, you've gone too far." Fishermen, it turned out, LOVED sending coordinates for stuff they saw so long as their fishing spot wasn't nearby.

Cool article btw!

[AlexandrB]

iNaturalist is great for stuff like this as it allows organizations to create projects for data collection on specific species.

[mapmeld]

I've also noticed that iNaturalist also fuzzes exact locations for some species within a geographic grid (example: zebra) even the ranch zebra in California.

[NooneAtAll3]

> users immediately nope out of government websites that ask for their location

I for one am glad that that's the trained reaction of the masses

[raw_anon_1111]

Really? You don’t understand why people wouldn’t want to share their location with the government?

[kelnos]

I get the reflex to deny permissions (and I also get the reflex to allow anything, in the interest of just getting the annoying pop-up to go away), but it's really tiresome that we have to expect people to avoid thinking even the least bit critically at every juncture.

If you're filling out a form with the express purpose of letting someone know specifically where something is... a request for location information is reasonable, duh. And I won't accept the "people are busy and don't have the time and energy to think this through" excuse. If you're taking the time to fill out this form, then yes, you have the time -- seconds, at most -- to think this through in this particular case.

[raw_anon_1111]

Right because that has worked so well with PCs over the last 40 years. Do you remember the people that had a dozen toolbars on their browser because if bundleware? Not to mention viruses and ransomware.

[JTbane]

If a state environmental agency asks you for your location on photos that you volunteered to upload and you freak out, you might be mentally ill.

[Shalomboy]

I wouldn't take it that far. For most users we spoke to, its often a reflex to deny location privilege popups, and on mobile it wasn't easy enough to fix once denied. However for some of the less-engaged folks who might be out in the park casually and stumbled on something worth sharing, the idea that we need their exact location probably sounded overbearing. "I told them which park I was in, that should be enough!"

Yeah no kidding the vulnerable animal population is in the park, that's where all their threats are removed. But sometimes "the park" is 60,000 acres and it would be nice if you could help narrow it down.

[saltcured]

Or the permission prompt isn't clearly worded or precise enough to understand whether you are allowing the location of this one photo to be shared, versus agreeing to some ongoing tracking...

[raw_anon_1111]

You have way more faith in the government not using any information it has against you than I do….

You have been paying attention to what’s going on haven’t you?

[xorcist]

A government agency, which might even have good use for the data, isn't the problem. The problem is sending your precise location to Facebook and a two dozen silly little games and a note app, which all sell this data to anyone and their brother.

By framing the problem as being with untrustworthy government agencies rather than with greedy data brokers selling data everywhere, you are part of the problem. You may distrust your government as much as you'd like, but before we solve the problems with private data brokers, we can never improve the situation.

[imtringued]

If I were to visit or migrate to the US, I'd have to take every precaution to avoid ICE mistaking me for an illegal immigrant.

[raw_anon_1111]

The difference is that private brokers don’t have “a monopoly on [legslized] violence”. Facebook doesn’t have an army of masked jack booted thugs with military gear.

[xorcist]

Sure, but those masked thugs of yours can simply buy what they need from Facebook. They have deep pockets and it would not even be an inconvenience for them. In fact, for at least for political systems with checks and balances, subcontracting to data brokers carry huge upsides of minimizing responsibilities.

[sfmike]

so aaron schwartz is alive?

[Shalomboy]

I was being facetious there, to be clear. my bad.