[SGVLUG] Fw: FYI: Meetup.com & PRIVACY isn't what you might think...

[Tom Emerson]

The moderator of a "meetup" group that I've joined recently posted a warning message about the meetup site and how your "privacy" might not be as protected as you might think.  The actual message that was posted was quite long, and as the "group" might be considered "dubious" in certain circles [think "2600", but for non-techies...], I've been asked to excise even the references to the group itself.


----- Forwarded Message ----
From: [group moderator] <info at meetup.com>
To: [the_group]-announce at meetup.com
Subject: FYI / Meetups / PRIVACY notice / Please Read!

Greetings, all -- 

It recently came to my attention that it's possible 
to locate Meetup profiles with a Google search. 
I expected that might be the case with organizers, 
but apparently it's the case for anyone signed up. 

A person in one of our Meetup groups did a google 
search on her legal name, and was dismayed to find 
that it brought up her [group] profile. 
She wrote me with a complaint, saying that she did 
not want that information accessible to her family 
and/or business customers; and she requested that 
I remove it. 

Unfortunately, I have no control over what sort of 
information Meetup.com makes available to internet 
search engines. Due to privacy concerns, most [members]
are careful not to use their legal 
names when signing up for anything they don't want to 
become public knowledge. (This applies to photos too.) 

[...] This goes not only for our groups, of course, 
but for any and all Meetup groups. [TE: And, I might note, this
may even be true for "membership" within SGVLUG -- although
we don't have a true "membership roster", posting messages
to the group's address will get archived, and that archive is
searched/crawled by google and others -- we have instructions 
on our site on how to avoid this using an X-NO-ARCHIVE flag]

You can check to see if your profile is available 
via a search engine by just typing in the name that 
you signed up under, and maybe the word "Meetup." 
[sgvlug, or any other group/site were you would be concerned about being "associated with"]
That will most likely bring up your meetup.com 
personal profile page, with your member number. 

On that page, you will find listed the various 
Meetup groups that you belong to. There is an 
option to hide the list, for privacy. However, 
even that might not be sufficient to totally 
protect your privacy, since there are various 
other ways that members interact with the group,
leaving comments and messages, etc. Also, you might 
want to leave your meetup groups visible for some 
reason, so folks can see what you're interested in. 

The other option would be to change your user name. 
If you're currently using your legal name, then 
that might be a good idea. 

[...] [TE: the next section dealt with ways to remove your name from the meetup "profile" page, but if you've been a member longer than a few months, it is likely to have been "cached" by the search engines -- suffice it to say, it's a difficult genie to get back into the bottle...] [TE: Ultimately, the "final solution" is to leave and re-join meetup.com as a new member, taking care to not spill the beans that you are the same person that just left...]

There is no other way that I'm aware of to be safely 
disentangled from the Google cache of your Meetup profile, 
since it goes by your membership number. 

Anyway: it's up to each individual how much privacy 
you wish to maintain online. For some people just 
hiding the list of their meetup groups will be enough, 
while others will probably want to change their user 
name; and a few people might even want to go through 
the process of leaving meetup.com, and re-joining. 

I'm sorry that this is all so complicated and vexsome; 
and perhaps an unpleasant surprise. I would suggest 
that anyone who values their online privacy might want 
to make their preferences known to Meetup.com. It's hard 
to imagine they're not aware that people would be unhappy 
at having their profiles made publicly accessible via 
Google; but apparently they have not received too many 
complaints about it, if they're still doing it. 

[...] [signature]

PS: Another privacy concern that I imagine goes 
without saying: Don't use your email address at 
work as your meetup.com contact address, if you 
don't want your boss or employer or coworkers to 
know that you're a [member] of [group]. It's easy to 
sign up for various free email services. (Such as 
Hotmail.com, which has now become Live.com, 
and part of MSN, I believe.)
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