Raglan Niall  Apr 13

No inaturalist for me. It won't let me proceed without that one.

Nice of them to at least ask 🙂

#dataSoverignty
#America #iNaturalist

Show threadJohanna, CanCon variety

@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.

Apr 13 at 2:28amWeb
Show threadJon SullivanApr 13

@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.)

Show threadJon SullivanApr 13
@johannab @Niall As a partner in the iNaturalist Network, NZ also maintains a local backup of NZ's iNat content.
Show threadJon SullivanApr 13

@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.

Show threadJohanna, CanCon varietyApr 13

@joncounts @Niall

yeah, I get that. gotta think about it some more. I'm trying to de-googlify myself too and that is running hard. I've used gmail since the days of "you have to wait for an invite for gmail's upcoming release".

I also don't want to cast out all good babies with the fashy bathwater, I know there's lots of good ethical tech work done by US-ians, but I also want to see more serious consideration of regionalization and data sovereignty - for my good AND theirs.