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Ability To Hide Observing Sites from Regional Activity

While I think this map is very cool and love seeing where people are making observations from, I don't love that you can click and zoom in on a user's exact location to see where they're observing from.  I observe from multiple private locations, and as it is, I can only set one of them as my 'home' so it doesn't show up on this map.  Since I've done that, I won't be adding any observations from my 'actual' home to keep that location private as well.  Can the map be set to not give such precise coordinates when an observation is clicked and maybe not allowing zooming in more than a couple of levels?  

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    Dave Whipps Official comment

    Chris,

    Thanks for the comments!

    To be clear, the location of all observations shown in Regional Activity are "anonymized."

    While you can see a blue dot with a definite lat long, that dot is only "somewhere within 150 square miles of where the observation was taken." That is, we strip off the lat/long position after one decimal place in degrees, giving an indeterminate area of a circle of about 7 miles radius.

    The current confusion likely rests on two factors:

    1) The fact that we don't mention that anywhere! (Sorry.)

    2) The fact that you can zoom in, and the blue dot doesn't appear to cover a wide area.

    I'm going to see if I can fix both of these issues, and make it more clear that we're not giving anyone the exact coordinates of your house!

    - Dave

     

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    Dave Whipps

    UPDATE:

    • We have since further-anonymized the presented data. Observation sites are now only displayed with an accuracy of about 70 miles. That's an area of more than 10,000 square miles.
    • Further, we now highlight this area on the globe, to better indicate this level of anonymity.
    • Over the next few days, we'll add an opt-out to the privacy settings to allow users to control whether their (always-anonymized) observations are included in the Regional Activity at all.
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    Chris

    Thanks for making some changes here.  I just looked at it a few minutes ago and I couldn't recreate what I saw the other day since you've added the new 70 mile feature.  Previously, a few days ago, I zoomed in on my own green dot and it literally went to the parking lot I was observing it, so I'm not sure the 7 mile radius would have coincidentally landed directly on that parking lot, but I guess it's possible?  I also zoomed in on a few other people's locations and appeared to end up very close to what looked like their observing location, but again, this was days ago.

    Another thing, I'm not seeing all observations coming up on this map as they should.  For example, I made two observations last night from a location other than my home location in Missouri and, while I get a green dot on my account, I see nothing when I login to another account I created for testing.  Also, there is a day or two this week where almost no observations pop up across the entire United States.  That seems unlikely to be accurate, especially given that my observation isn't popping up.

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    Dave Whipps

    Chris,

    Be sure to check out the dates. The window of time usually only goes to about "yesterday." Further, the times presented in the time bar are, I believe UT, so might not match up exactly with what you're expecting.

    - Dave

     

     

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