Metal Detecting Under the Microscope: Sharing a "Peril" of Reporting

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A cautionary tale from a metal detecting forum. A member calling himself "Geoman" is warning about the consequences of giving the PAS true findspots for finds. He says one of "his (sic) farmers" was approached by a local club to ask if they could hunt for artefacts on his land. He did not give them permission as he already had metal detectors on his land. On asking why his land was of interest to this club:

They told him that the area seemed interesting from the number of finds that had been recorded from the area on the PAS database ! This rang alarm bells as i have recorded nearly all my finds from that area with the PAS over the last couple of years. I typed in the village name into the PAS database and up they came in a long list for any one to see. The parish is not a large one and much of the land is owned by two landowners both of whom i have permission from so it would not take long to locate who owned the land by asking in the Post Office or local shop. Moral of the story you record at your peril and even if the findspots are detailed to the FLO as parish for the PAS database it is easy to see where is productive simply by looking at the village name and a little research. No more recording for me from now on as land is hard enough to find and to keep.

Well, that probably tops the lot as far as excuses for joining the non-recorders goes. Every parish in England has archaeological finds in it. Lots of them, after several millennia of continuous human activity  in the past. Every single parish in the land would produce lots of dots on a map if ten thousand artefact hunters with 260 000 machines (so they claim) were to report what they've hoiked from the soil in forty years hoiking. So basically the map of England should be one black mass of dots in areas accessible to past settlement and modern metal detectors. The fact that some are whiter than others is due to non-recording.  The metal detectorist"lordofthecoils" has the same problem:  

have had the same thing happen geoman .....looks like the pas sceme could backfire on itself if this is the general trend. i am meeting my flo on friday will put this problem to her , will post the results of this on friday evening........

(no you will not, as - if past behaviour is anything to go by, the moment the moderators learn the thread is being discussed here, they'll delete it). Well, the answer is simple, to stop other artefact hunters poaching "your" sites, why not simply give the PAS false data? Shift the findspots into the neighbouring parish. Nobody will ever know. Or you could just accept that if the common archaeological heritage is up for grabs no one artefact hunter has more "rights" to bits of it than any other (or any other member of the public). The landowner is at perfect liberty to invite as many guests onto his land to hoik it out as he feels comfortable with. What gives these artefact hunters such a sense of entitlement? They are not "their" farmers, nor "their" sites. And nor is the PAS database theirs to manipulate to their own ends.