How NOT To Be Private On D* (Or, How To Unwittingly Expose Yourself To Strangers) (Diaspora* Alpha)

Users who have a public profile in their daily lives—lawyers, teachers, social workers, and so on—may not want to expose themselves to the larger D* community or the internet. (Of course, anyone can hide his or her identity by not using a real name, but not everyone wants to do that.)

If you are interested in maintaining your privacy, maybe there are some simple privacy lapses you engage in without realizing it: (1) you are allow people to search for you within Diaspora, (2) you post, comment on, or like public posts, and (3) you have profile #tags.

1) You have allowed other users to search for you within Diaspora.

• When you signed up for Diaspora, you may have checked the “Allow for people to search for you within Diaspora” box (see Figure 1).
• To turn this option on or off, click on your <USERNAME> in the upper right-hand corner of your page, then “Settings,” and then “Profile” (menu option at the top).
• Towards the profile settings bottom of the page, you will see the section “Search” and a box to (un)check in order to change whether or not you are searchable, as in Figure 1.
• Don’t forget to save your setting by clicking Update Profile at the bottom of the page.

  

  Figure 1: Allow users to search for your profile

2) You engage in Public Posts.

• When you post publicly, these posts are public in the every sense of the word, and may even show up on search engines like DuckDuckGo or Google.
• If you comment on a public post, again these posts are just that, public; see above.
• If you like a public post, your profile name and picture will appear when a user looks at who else has liked that post. (NB I think Following a post does NOT expose you to strangers.)

How to tell if a post is public or not: A public post is marked Public in the lower-left corner, as in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Public posts are marked as public, as highlighted in red. (Note that all people who like the post are also shown next to the heart.)

3) Profile #Tags

• If you have profile #tags—see Figure 3 below—when other users click on a tag page, your profile may appear in the left panel as a follower of that #tag. This could be problematic in some cases; for example, you may not want strangers to know that you are a fan of #kennyg or #sex (although who isn’t a fan?).
• Note: you should be able to simply follow #tags without anyone knowing—as long as it is not a profile tag.
• To change your profile tags, click on your <USERNAME> in the upper right-hand corner of your page, then Settings, and then Profile (the menu option at the top): towards the top of the page you will see “Describe yourself In 5 words” (see Figure 3) where you can add your profile #tags. (In the example in Figure 3, anyone could see my profile in the left panel when they click on the tag page for #pillowfortress, #kennyg, and #sex—and maybe I don’t want that.)

Figure 3: Profile tags.

Note that there is one area that you do not have control over: your friends may choose to allow other contacts in an aspect to see their friends‘ profiles (see Make Contacts (In)Visible To Each Other On D* for more information). At this point, there is nothing you can do about that.

This post is not meant to delve into deeper privacy concerns related to Diaspora or the internet in general. If interested, see the lovely http://my.pages.de/dsn-vn/ for a visual story about privacy with respect to distributed networks.

=== Related Posts In PillowFortress ===

– Only See Your Friends In Your Stream (Diaspora* Alpha)

– Make Contacts (In)Visible To Each Other On D* (Diaspora* Alpha)

– How To Follow #Hashtags On D* (Diaspora* Alpha)

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