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It's more than 'disappointing'.
I have an expectation that posts I have made in non-public areas of the forum are not made public.
The privacy policy makes it clear posts are considered personal information:
We describe the categories of personal information we collect in more detail below:
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Comments and opinions: such as comments and opinions you leave on the forumand then describes where they will be made available:
How we use your information
We will also use your personal information for the purposes specifically described below:
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Comments and opinions: we will display your public comments, opinions and responses on the public areas of the forum. We will not publicly display your private messages or private interactions with us or another user.--
Edit follows:
It then goes on to say:
Changes to this policy
We may update this privacy policy from time to time and so you should review this policy periodically. When we change this privacy policy in a material way, we will update the "last modified" date at the bottom of this privacy policy. Changes to this privacy policy are effective when they are posted on this page.But there have been no updates, more recently than one 10 years ago, as far as I can see.
I'm now spending part of Christmas Day removing information about me that I never intended to be public. It's already been made public, of course, and may well have been compiled into archives.
chez_jay-
Well yeah, I agree
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I have an expectation that posts I have made in non-public areas of the forum are not made public
When you put something on the internet, it's there forever for everybody. You already published to thousands of unvetted registered users, three random people who bother to follow a link on the fourth page of search results seeing it too is hardly the end of the world.
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I have an expectation that posts I have made in non-public areas of the forum are not made public.
They're not.
Members area has never, is not, and will not be public.
DMs have never, are not, and will not be public.
Other very explicitly named areas that might exist have never, are not, and will not be public.Everything else on the forum has always been public... and the only thing that changed earlier this year is that I blocked AI scrapers and all bots from even accessing the public... but I've undone that, to allow archiving to occur, because archiving involves bots.
I don't know what you thought happened, but it's certainly not a change from anything that has existed since forever on the site. The only thing is undoing a block only recently put in place to stop bots. If you posted a year ago and it wasn't in an explicitly private forum... then it was already public.
I just logged out and the private areas remain private, the public areas remain public.
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Are you reassured now? Because this seems to have been an unwarranted panic.
PhilDAS
gbj_tester
Velocio
itsbruce
I expect that would open up the possibility of action under the misuse of private information where there is an expectation of privacy so I wouldn't think so
But it is a bit disappointing that members only areas are now public if that's the case