Privacy for Social Networks

There is some confusion about what constitutes spamming and what your members can do about it. Remember one person's notifications can be another person's spam which is the way that Ning has defaulted to when you join. You can send out notifications to all your friends emails across all networks because your default email settings allow you to get them. How can your members control unwanted emails? This can be controlled with friend's lists, personal settings, banning members off a site (not recommended because it does not solve the problem), and banning from Ning (Not recommeded because this goes against the Spirit of how Ning was created and you are destroying another persons dream or hard work). If a person is complaining to the creator of a network that they are getting email from another network, there are several remedies that can be taken. The easiest and most effective is to teach your members who complain the email in their inbasket is out of control is how to to use the privacy settings that Ning has given each member on your network so that they can control how they receive emails from across the ning network from their friends who might be working on other sites or their own creation on Ning. This is found in the following picture on their personal settings under a title called Email.

There is a section that can be selected that a person can choose not to receive any emails and that looks like the one below. Note: This would be different on your site to communicate with members except through the Ning email notifications, but would be very effective for cutting down the flood of email's that a person gets which they complain of as spam.

If a person does not want to receive emails from others across the network, they can choose to deselect receiving emails from friends or more drastically choose not to get any email in their personal email by choosing not receive any email from a site which means that you will not get any email from anyone, any group, any friend, any outside source on your site. I did this with a site because I was getting 50 - 75 emails from this group a day as well as solitiations for donations to give to their site. By doing the above, this insures that you will not receive any offending emails asking you to join a group from a friend outside the network. The down side is you stop getting important emails from the network. You can still turn off email from friends but get important email from the network if that is your main network. If you have several ning networks, you'll need to turn off emails for each network you belong to. Of course there are other more drastic measures that don't solve the problem but at least make a person feel that they are doing something. These include but are not limited to: 1. Teach people how to defriend a person. Once again this can be tricky because the person might be using an Avatar or other name on a site for whatever reason. 2. Make your network totally private where you have moderators who are in total control of the network an example of this is Lightworks.org which is totally separate from Ning or the Wiki groups. 3. Ban the offender off your network. This will not eliminate the problem unless the person can be identified. It becomes a bit more difficult but not impossible. The easy remedy is to join the network and learn the name of the person - many people use avatars or alter ego's on ning for whatever reason. This will not solve the problem because the banned person can still communicate with all his friends - even if banned. Further, you will still have a problem because members on the site who create groups or send out invitations to everyone thus not solving the problem. 4, The most drastic is to file a complaint with Ning trying to get the offending site off the Ning network which means that you might be destroying another persons hard work and dream. This step really is unnecessary if the Network Creator had just taught their members how to control their email settings in the first place. Marc Doyle (Lord Murugan on Atlantian Travelers Portal)

Is there a possibility to add our own privacy policy to the network, with a check box? We would like to add it in conformity of Italian laws... Many thanks sara maternini Codiceinternet.it

Currently when uploading videos and pictures, you have the following choices for "Who can view this video/photo?"... -Anyone -Just my friends -Just me I've had some network members request that they be able to make a video available only to members of a group or groups that they belong to. How difficult would it be to add the following choices for "Who can view this video/photo?"... -Just the groups I belong to -Just these groups that I belong to -group A -group B -etc. Thanks, Kyle

In the NING privacy policy it states: "As a Network Creator, you may have your own privacy policy applicable to your Network if approved by Ning in advance and in writing (on a case-by-case basis). " Can you please tell me how to go about doing this and approximately how long does it take?

Right now members have no real control over profile details. It would be great to have 3 levels of member choice in profile privacy: 1. profile open to all visitors, including non-members; 2. profile viewable only to members; 3. profile viewable only to friends.

I've recently changed my community content settings to stop members from creating groups. I would like my members to be able to create groups.. however, I do not want to violate my community member's privacy by allowing group creators and admins to see member e-mails. Member email addresses are plainly visible through the "manage group members" function. Can this be changed easily? I'm not looking to dig into any code currently. But, it seems that this may have been overlooked. If it was not, please share the reasoning for showing the emails to group creators within a community. Respectfully submitted. Jim - medXcentral

It has been noted that when a member joins a group, his/her email becomes visible to the member who created the group. This is a serious privacy issue, and I ended up suspend all the member-created groups in my network. It would be great if the field of display "member email" can be deleted in the "manage group member" window. That would make many NCs feel more comfortable about letting members create groups. Also, it serves no useful purpose at all to let each group creator see these emails.

I noticed that files & photos stored in our private network are available for public viewing even though my Network is private. Shouldn't these be protected unless accessed from the creating network??? (granted...you'd have to know the complex URL. I hope these aren't indexable by google/search engines) An example: http://tinyurl.com/6zeqme

Any change been made yet on the ability to change a group's privacy settings? re: http://networkcreators.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=492224%3ATopic%3A85528

Hello ~ Before I came to Ning, I asked a few questions about privacy and received answers that I thought I understood, but now that I'm here, the more I read about privacy, the less sure I am. * I THINK that setting a group to private will protect it's personal information from searches, peekers, and info thieves like ancestry.com. (It's a forum for my relatives, so nearly everything will be private from everybody else. I don't want bots stomping through the private stuff and I don't want ancestry.com stealing the personal OR genealogical info.) * Is the network info fairly safe with the private setting or am I wrong to think so? * Now what about allowing searchers or surfers to view the Main page? (Seems like it would create more curiosity and make the sign-up process less intimidating.) They will still have to request permission to join before they get to see any of the full posts or member info, right? They will see the members' avatars and names, the title of forum messages, and the photos. * Is there a way to conceal the names that go with the member avatars on the Main page? * I cannot download the photos from the Main page, but I can print them, although the print doesn't come out very well. Is there a way to prevent unauthorized printing? As I understand it, none of the features, such as "Photo", can be transferred to a non-Main page, correct? * Will allowing the Main page to be visible increase the network's presence in search engines in case a disconnected relative tries a family search? That might make up for the reduction of privacy by having the Main page visible. Thanks for your help.