Private Documents Should Be Private

Occasionally, I will have a Document start out as Private - these, apparently, do not show up under 'Activity' except to Family members (padlock is seen next to two recent-ish ones, not others - checked from my test-account and those not listed under Activity - at the time, did not record which defaulted to Private - but know I noticed the box was blank, just stopped myself from auto-clicking it every now and then).

So clearly if Geni would just change the default, or let us choose our default, that would help this situation.

I like the idea of a per-user default.

I disagree, - the document feature in Geni is meant to be used as documentation for profiles, usually from public sources, - not as a storage for your personal document collection. If you want to make a document private you do however have an option for that, but it should not be the default option - nothing is more annoying than viewing a public profile with source references to a private document.

Bjorn. If a document appears in Recent Activity of any member, clicking on 'xxxxxx has added a document' will give access to all documents of that user. Lois is experiencing this right now.

I suspect that a similar situation occurs with photos, and I'm trying to reproduce it.

Why does Geni see an advantage in opening a members document album?

Bjorn. You feel that my family's personal letters should be made public? We joined Geni for the feature of sharing and communicating with family.

I know that the topic of 'are Geni's goals compatible?' has been raised many times, but you and others have decided that they are not, and that the private/family/sharing aspect of Geni should be removed for the public good.

I my opinion, it has already gone.

No, I say that I disagree that documents added should be private by default.

If you click on 'xxxxxxx has added a document' you see the lot.

A new member would be adding their immediate family, and to somehow intuitively know that the documents added are publicly available is unreasonable.

To know that profiles added are private, but documents added to those profiles are public is not intuitive.

If you tag one of your documents/photos to a public profile/event then it becomes public. That's how I thought it worked.

Now, your document (and probably photo - if I can reproduce the circumstance) albums are public - like it or not. I've already had an unrelated member browsing my photo albums - there's a lot of personal stuff in there.

My understanding - part of the rationale for Public Documents and Private Documents was so Public Profiles could have both -- folks might be more willing to make Dad or Grandpa a Public Profile, if they knew they they could still designate certain Documents as "Private" - with "Private" in this case supposed to mean the Family can see, not the General Public nor other Geni Users.

No idea what the rationale for Public Documents for Private Profiles is. But allowing Private Documents for Public Profiles makes perfect sense to me with folks allowed and many choosing to make Public Profiles for relatively close-in relatives. This, plus Public vs Private Discussions about a Profile, plus Public vs Private messages in your Guestbook were the first steps they took in what, at one point, looked like a move to have it possible to have both a Private layer and a Public layer of the same Profile (if that terminology makes sense to anyone).