Enhanced following privacy

A few weeks ago we introduced following, a great way to control your notifications and keep track of the users, profiles, and now projects you’re interested in.

Although following does not have any privacy implications (you don’t gain any additional access to profile information by following a profile), some users were not comfortable with people they don’t know following their close relatives.

Even though this did not in any way violate the privacy of these profiles, we take privacy very seriously and want to make sure that our users are comfortable adding private profiles of their close relatives.

As of today, we no longer allow strangers to follow private profiles. A private profile can now only be followed by a close relative. Over the next few days, we’ll be removing all followers from private profiles that aren’t close relatives.

Thank you all for your feedback on this feature, and please keep it coming so we can continue to meet your privacy expectations.