Should search display non searchable profiles if they are contacts?
I'm not sure if this is a bug or intended behavior, but currently when searching by name the search does not display profiles of people who selected not to be searchable (in profile settings), even if they are contacts of us. Since we already added them and "know" their names (the names of all contacts are visible to us) I think it would make sense to be able to search for them by name, e.g for quickly getting to their stream. What do you think?
Itai Tue 18 Feb 2014 9:02PM
The option prevents the general public (i.e non-contacts) from finding you on the network by your name. This is to prevent people who know you by name from finding your diaspora profile. If they found it some other way it is pointless to keep blocking the search by name for them because they have the link to your profile / can access you from contacts page if they added you. So keeping the search blocked will not help anymore for privacy. On the other hand, it will confuse many users with legitimate contacts.
Itai Tue 18 Feb 2014 9:12PM
I think a better definition of the issue is to say that the search by name should be able to search through all the names visible to us (currently, all contacts and searchable profiles). Most users would expect it to work this way.
Then, if we want to add an option to limit visibility of names to contacts the search should respect it. Since there is no such option at the moment, I would consider this behavior to be a bug. In any case, the current behavior does not help privacy because of what I wrote above.
goob · Tue 18 Feb 2014 8:56PM
Then are you suggesting we remove the user option to 'Allow for people to search for you within Diaspora' in the settings? Because from what you're proposing, turning this setting off so that you are not searchable becomes absolutely meaningless.