Geoprivacy

Geoprivacy, while defined as "individual rights to prevent disclosure of the location of one's home, workplace, daily activities, or trips," should also extend to "things that people have on their property." If we consider further, it should also extend to protecting those who have no voice, like the forest, the plains, our natural spaces, and their inhabitants. The knowledge of location information is a double-edged sword. At once it satisfies our insatiable curiosity of "what's over there?" but also allows for abuse of secret, hidden, and sensitive places.

How then should a landform website, whose objective is to share location information, handle such a moral conundrum?

I have carefully crafted a mission statement so that I can refer back to it when forgetful and be held accountable when questioned.

The mission of Tennessee Landforms is to serve the outdoor and scientific communities and facilitate the responsible documentation and sharing of location information related to natural features within our state.

There it is, "responsible." This word, like any other words we use, is sufficiently vague to leave room for individual interpretation. Who knows what may be determined as responsible? We look back at our own lives where at the time we thought we were making responsible decisions, and later realize we were, in fact, irresponsible. In the same way, Tennessee Landforms is beginning a new life, and it may be decided that we were irresponsible in our sharing. Therefore, I offer only my best guarantee that this website and its associated data will be nuanced, dynamic, and responsive to the needs of the many and will consider above all other things human safety and conservation values.
To this end, we have devised three different levels of data:

• Public
• Public, save for location information
• Private

Public

Currently, most of the data in this dataset is provided as unrestricted. Latitude and longitude, brief descriptions, and sometimes photos are provided.

Public, save for location information

A small amount of landforms are documented here with locations not provided publicly for safety and conservation reasons. I would encourage anyone who is actively finding waterfalls to utilize this to document their finds. This provides a few benefits like:

• Offsite backup
  If you're keeping your data on a cell phone or a GPS, then a time may come when your hardware is damaged and the data corrupts. Having an offsite backup to your data will provide redundancy in the event that you lose it.
• Official records
  If it's important to find stuff but you don't want to share it with the masses, here's a place where you can make a (semi) official claim that this record is actually yours. As part of the new dataset submitter information is recorded, permanently stamping your name to a particular find.
• Science
  Not everyone is as excited about science as I am, and I understand that. But if you're sharing data here as Public, save for location information, then you're allowing a select handful of researchers access to your data so that they can better understand the world. We're all curious, but in different ways.

Private

If you don't want anyone to know anything about your find, save for me, this provides you the benefits mentioned above of offsite backup and official records. If you still don't want to share your information, I understand, respect your agency, and wish you the best.
Unfortunately, at some point someone will log your waterfall or arch, and then it will have the name they give it, and their name on the record. There will be no way to independently verify that it was yours in the first place. We can only work with the information that we have, so I would encourage this option if you're unwilling to share at any other level.