Wrong Planet, privacy and principles.

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Hello everyone,

This is mainly directed at the administrators of Wrong Planet, but also at the users.

I haven't been posting and lurking here in a while, because I took some distance from groups and communities associated with psychiatry and autism.
I see this as a good thing; communities like this have certain taboos, limit my way of thinking and don't help me improve myself.

Please understand that I completely respect your point of view and I'm convinced that these forums actually help people and improve peoples lifes. It's just not for me.

My concern is this: I simply stopped posting and a few months went past, until a friend showed me you could simply put in my email adress in Google and it would bring you to my account on this site. It would not only link to my account, but also show posts in which I tell a lot of personal things, like my experience with the psychiatry and my diagnosis. I find this very problematic, since everyone who knows my email adress could just google it to know things of me I don't want them to know. Most friends and family know it already, but I'm especially worried about people I will have a professional relationship with, or future classmates and co workers. I want to keep my private and professional life seperated, I hope you can understand that.

I was only sixteen at the time I made this account and wasn't quite aware of the "open book" structure of the internet. I now avoid talking about my personal life on the internet, I see now how careless that was.

I ofcourse have a responsibility myself and I admit I was quite naieve for expecting the creators of a website to keep things remotely private (by which I mean: not shown in google. This is ofcourse a public forum).
But I think message boards like this also have a responsiblity to protect their users, since the users share quite some personal stories here.

I've sent some emails to Alex Plank but I got no reply. I also used the search tool, and the posts I found about this matter concerned me. It seems like the staff of Wrong Planet refuses to delete accounts out of principle. This irritates me, since you're keeping a community together. You could atleast listen to your users and their concerns.

To be clear, let me put the issues I have with privacy in a row:

- It's impossible to delete your account

- Only administrators seem to be able to delete your account, and they refuse to do this.

- A Wrong Planet account is easily found by putting in someones email adress in Google.

- Wrong Planet states that your email will be hidden from the public, but it clearly is not.

- If you remove your email adress or put in another, your account will still be shown in google when searching for the old one. It's not possible - for me, atleast- to remove my email adress from public information.

My personal concern is that my email adress is still publicly shown, but a wider concern is that you seem to store information. You're problably in your rights (although you wouldn't get away with it on this side of the ocean, legally) and I would like to stress that I'm not trying to get in a legal debate here, but in a moral one.

Please be empathetic with your users, even those that want to leave. I hope you understand my concerns and are able to help me out.

Sincerely,

Lode

EDIT: Also I have changed all my personal information, so my age, diagnosis etc. aren't accurate.

Last edited by Lode on 24 Apr 2011, 11:16 am, edited 4 times in total.

I put my email address into Google and got nothing, no results whatsoever.

You do know there's a little radio button in the edit profile page, right? "Always show my Email Address: o Yes o No"

I completely agree with Lode's concerns. I just don't see what the justification is of why a user can't delete his own account if the user wishes to. Or to preserve the forum content, at least change the account to anonymous.

Yes, I'm aware of that. It was "officially" hidden, but still shown. I have now removed my actual email for months and it's still shown on google. Did you use quotation marks?

I just tried mine with and without quotation marks and it came up blank.

At some time or other the email address must have been left showing on the profile (or the msn address) Google will have picked up that information (and Google never forgets) and your privacy is gone. It isn't generally a good idea to expose your email address in your profile because it will also attract spam. Once the spammers have your email address there is no going back and they will spam you for ever.

Yes. "Laid is played", and, rightly or wrongly, WP is not responsible for that.

Just double checked looking up my email address in Google and zero matches. But I've never exposed it in my profile. To be extra safe I use an email address specifically for this site, so it can't be linked directly to me even if it became public anyway.

It is a good idea to use a different email address you never use online so that way when people google your email address, nothing will pop up. Use two separate email addresses. One to use for real life and one to only use online. Do this next time when you register on any forums in the future.

Yes, I should do that in the future. It's a bit harsh that my sixteen-year-old gullibility is punishing me this mercilessly.



I could have exposed it in the past, yes. And it might be googles fault that it's still exposed. Would it make a difference if Wrong Planet didn't store information? Just curious.



I don't really care about responsibility for the email adress. It's not like I'm going to sue. It would solve a part of the problem if I was able to delete my account.

If I have heard correctly, that kind of thing can cause link troubles or whatever within the database.

It's possible to change your email here but google might still have it stored and this place would still pop up when someone does a search on it.

Can you be specific? With "that kind of thing", do you mean deleting a user account? Where have you heard this and what kind of troubles do you mean?

Do you perhaps mean that forums in which I have posted get bugged? I think I have read something about that when searching for other threads on this subject. If this is the problem, couldn't that be solved by changing my username in those threads to "deleted user" or "anonymous"?



I've already changed it months ago and still pops up like you say, but would it still pop up if Wrong Planet wouldn't store that kind of information? I also think deleting my account would help, because there would be nothing to lead to on google, and my posts wouldn't be readable.