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.)
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?
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.
What made the data junk? Were the provided coordinates not precise enough, incorrect, something else?
Cool article btw!
I for one am glad that that's the trained reaction of the masses
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.
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.
You have been paying attention to what’s going on haven’t you?
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.