Why the inconsistency over publicly displaying your email address?

Paul W

Under the Community code of conduct ("These behaviors are unacceptable and not allowed") is this item:

"Posting personally identifiable information including, but not limited to, phone numbers, email addresses, passwords, helper numbers. (This is for your safety.)"

So why is it possible to publicly show ones email address under "Account and Privacy Settings"?

Alan E. Brown

If you choose to make your email address public on FamilySearch under Settings, you are specifically choosing a switch labeled "Public" -- so you are making a conscious choice to make that information public.

Here on Community, on the other hand, it is not uncommon for people to make posts, mistakenly thinking that they are communicating privately with FamilySearch Support. Such posts sometimes contain more personal information than those people intended to make public on the Internet.

I think it's good for FamilySearch to be cautious in helping those naive posters to avoid mistakenly exposing personal information.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I wonder if it has to do with visibility without a login?

I went and tested this in a different browser: I didn't log in to FS and went to Community. I could read threads, but clicking on a poster's username took me to the login screen. So if users put their emails in their posts, I can see them without logging in, but their privacy settings on their accounts make no difference: all I can see is their usernames. That "public" setting is more limited than the word implies: it's actually "public to other logged-in users".

Paul W

@Alan E. Brown

Thank you for your response, which makes perfect sense.

Obviously, you realise exactly to what I am referring, but for some reason I'm (still) unable to post my screenshot!