Facebook is threatening to remove the ability to sign in to iNaturalist with a Facebook account on March 20. We're not sure if that will happen or not, but if you regularly sign in to iNaturalist with your Facebook account, please follow these steps to make sure you can sign in without Facebook (if you never sign in with Facebook you can ignore this):
If you have any problems, please email help@inaturalist.org (we will not reply to direct messages on iNat).
THE DETAILS
Facebook has increasingly stringent security requirements for applications that access data from their platform, which includes any application that supports signing in with a Facebook account. Most of these requirements are good ideas, but they can be difficult to implement, and only 2-3 people on our team are able to do so. Just assessing their requests and replying to them can take days. We are hoping to meet their requirements by the deadline, but you should take the steps above to ensure you are able to sign in to your iNat account no matter what. We are also not committed to supporting Facebook Login in the future, so it's doubly worth making sure you have a working password.
These are the attributes from Facebook that we store and why we store them:
The Facebook user ID and email address are as private and secure as any other private data on iNat, and depending on your Facebook preferences, we may never have accessed anything other than your user ID.
You can learn more about Facebook’s data security requirements for developers at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/development/maintaining-data-access/data-protection-assessment.