openstreetmap
Profile settings should indicate visibility
As a logged-in user, it isn’t necessarily clear to me which profile settings are visible to other users or the logged-out public. Some settings like the image appear publicly, while the location only appears to followers. My own profile sports extra edit buttons that obviously no one else would see, which could make me wonder whether any of the things I do see, such as the social links, are visible to anyone else.
Each of these settings should have some kind of indication as to their visibility. For example, add “This is shown publicly” to the image editing page, and “This is shown to followers” to the location editing page. These indicators could link to the OSMF privacy policy for more information. In the future, this potentially could become a control for the user to decide whether to make an individual field public, if we determine that it’s necessary to give them that level of granularity.
#4507 requested something similar but only for the location setting.
It's not really true that only followers can see your location because if you look at your dashboard you will see all nearby users even if you're not following them.
Hm yeah, so something like “Shown to followers and other users who have nearby home locations”? Not very succinct, but we have plenty of space on that tab.
Everything on the profile is publicly visible, one way or another. That was part of the reasoning I had for splitting the profile, preferences and account pages into three different concepts.
I think we should just make clear that everything on the profile becomes public information. I know that some people don't realise that their home location is public, because we don't show a map on your public profile, but it's indirectly public via the "nearby users" feature.
As for showing the editing buttons inline with the profile - personally, I think this is a mis-feature. As part of splitting up the profile and dashboard pages, I wanted the profile page to look to yourself the way it looks to other people, to reduce confusion. Adding various edit buttons has moved away from this again. For example, the layout I see when I view my own profile is different than when other people view it, due to an additional column for the "Edit profile details" button/menu.
Especially if everything is public, we should make that explicit, because plenty of sites ask for profile information just to show internally or for no particular reason. I think the “how” is useful here too. Just knowing that someone somehow can view this information probably raises more questions than answers. But if we can refer to a page where the user themselves can already view that same information about others, that creates more understanding about how the software works. It would also be a good opportunity to link to the privacy policy where it’s more relevant than on the About page.