USG Privacy and Google

[deusex]

Two members over the past 6 months have realized that Google is finding their profiles and photos asking me if I can do anything about it.

I've mentioned this before, but USG is a public website. While Google doesn't have access to your email, private registration information that you provided, or the private messages you write but it will crawl the pages of USG and messages, public profiles and images can show up in searches.

There is a way to stop Google from indexing the pages of USG, but without traffic from Google, then we'd have very few new members, advertisers would pull out and USG would die a slow death.

If you're in a place in your life where being found out about your sexuality or underwear fetish could be detrimental to you, then be smart and close your account. Although I hate to see member leave, it's probably for the best.

If you do want to stay on here but are worried, don't do silly things - don't post your real name or email and don't show your face in your photos. One of the above mentioned members was freaking out because Google had found his email address. That information is not visible to Google (or anyone else) so it sent me into a bit of a panic. Turns out the member had posted his full email address in a comment of a photo. There's so many things wrong with that. Google is the first one, but spam robots scour webpages collecting emails to add to their spam mail lists.

USG has been going for over 10 years, and in those 10 years I've had 4 or 5 members panic over this issue so I imagine most members either don't care or have created online personas that cant be traced back to their real identities.

Which category do you fall into?