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Q. How is my privacy protected on the COMMUNITY NETWORK? Will others be able to read what I've written in Affinity Groups or see which Affinity Groups I am a member of?

A. The Community Network provides a high level of privacy from the general public. It will not show up on Google searches or the like, because it is an Intranet (see Intranet?) and is invisible to the general public and the World Wide Web. Members also have choices about how much information they want to be viewable by other members of the Community Network. (See also, Is It Safe For Me To Share My Personal Information? and Who Is On The Community Network[new page]?)

For any Community Network Affinity Group of which you are a member, you can control whether others can see your membership status on your Profile Page. From any Affinity Group Home Page you can click My Membership Settings, which will bring up a menu like this:

Where it says Show this Affinity Group on my View Profile Page, you can choose the radio button that says Do not show this Affinity Group on my "View Profile" page. I understand that if the moderator has set "Who Can View: Participant List" to "All People," I will be visible to non-participants visiting this Affinity Group. Your membership would still show up on that Affinity Group's member listing, if it is an Open one, but if it is a Private Affinity Group, your membership would not be visible anywhere.

Privacy in individual Affinity Groups (see Privacy Settings in Affinity Groups for details) involves the issues of membership, posting and reading.

Here is a graphic that shows the current detailed options for privacy settings:

Moderators make decisions about each of these privacy issues. The settings can be changed if moderators wish to. We encourage moderators to keep Affinity Group membership and participation open as much as possible, so that the largest number of Community Network members can benefit from the collective experience of others. It is helpful for Affinity Groups with closed membership and/or participation to have clearly spelled out criteria for inclusion so that others who would benefit will have access to pertinent information.

To learn all the details for setting your Affinity Group's privacy levels see see Privacy Settings in Affinity Groups, where there are charts and graphs a-plenty.

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