South Africa Goes After Wildlife-Tracking Apps

South African National Parks wants to ban smartphone apps that give you more information about interesting animals that others have seen on their visits (and allow you to share when you've seen a particularly wild creature of your own).

It's not that these parks are the targets of poaching—which you might quickly assume, given these apps would definitely give unscrupulous people an easy way to find special animals that others have encountered. But the reasons are every bit as serious, though. When animals are tagged within these apps, it can tend to create a rush of tourists all flocking to an area to see a particular animal.

"Most guests appreciate the leisurely drive through the parks and the potential reward of a good sighting as a key element of the visitor experience. This is an experience that SANParks commits to protecting and therefore the usage of these mobile applications is in direct contradiction to the ethos of responsible tourism espoused by SANParks," Hapiloe Sello, managing executive for tourism and marketing, said in a statement.

"We at SANParks discourage the use of these mobile applications as they tend to induce an unhealthy sense of eagerness for visitors to break the rules and, we are exploring legal mechanisms to curtail the use of sightings apps."

Specifically, SANParks is also concerned about other ramifications of these apps, including tourists speeding to destinations to see animals before they walk away or, worse, tourists accidentally running over animals with their vehicles because they were more concerned about booking it to a destination than being careful.

SANParks said it's "exploring legal mechanisms" for banning these apps, but didn't elaborate on how it would actually do that. Perhaps it should just figure out which of these sightseeing apps are the most popular, and flood them with dummy data to render them useless in these national parks. Telling people not to use an app might not be that effective, but making an app irritating to use could certainly work.

Source: South Africa Goes After Wildlife-Tracking Apps