Scientific Publications of New Species Provide Roadmaps for Wildlife Traffickers

The growing public nature of academic journals along with current best practices of sharing primary data for scientific research are profoundly valuable for the understanding of a species and their conservation efforts. On the other hand, public spatial data on endangered species may be easily abused by wildlife criminals. Researchers from the University of Oxford discuss how geo-indistinguishability, a formal notion of privacy for location-based systems, can be used to add noise to published spatial data whilst allowing quantification of such tradeoff.

This is not news. It is the reason why SRI, and responsible scientists have always refused to publish shark tracking data online or in scientific journals until a year or longer after a study concludes.