The Landing gives you a huge amount of control over your privacy!

Fine-grained access control over almost everything

Virtually everything on the Landing from individual details about you in your profile to blog posts to photos to groups can be as private or as public as you want it to be. Wherever you see an 'Access' option with a drop-down list (ie whenever you are posting almost anything) you can choose precisely who can can see it. As well as public and private, you may also choose to give access to only logged-in users, only the people you are following, only the members of a group you belong to, or an arbitrary subset of people you are following (using a collection). See Access control for more information on how to do this.

Public means public

Anything that is public will be seen by search engines and indexed so that others will be able to find it. If you do not want that to happen, do not make your content public!

Exceptions

There are a few minor exceptions to the rule that you can change access to whatever you want:

• comments: if you post a reply or comment on someone else's post, it will inherit the permissions of the post on which you are commenting - look for the access control details near the comment box that tell you how private your comments will be.  Why is this? It would make no sense to have some parts of a conversation visible to some people and some parts to others. Therefore, all conversations and discussions on a single post or topic have the same sets of permissions attached.
• the Wire: if you post to the Wire, it will be seen by all logged-in users, but not by the rest of the world. Why is this? The Wire is meant as a whole-site bulletin board that can be seen by everyone on the site, for sharing things with everyone else at AU. 
• your profile image and name: these are visible to the public (see below for how to obscure them). Why is this? Because it would otherwise be very confusing to deal with things that you have made public: we would be in the strange position of hiding your name while revealing what you have written. 

The defaults: only logged-in users

The access permissions for things you create here default to logged in users: that means anyone who can log into the Landing (people with an Athabasca University login ID plus a small number of known and accountable invited guests) can see the information you share. 

Making yourself completely anonymous and hidden

Apart from your name and profile image, there is nothing that can be seen by anyone who is not logged in to the Landing unless you explictly allow them to see it.

If you are concerned that your name and profile image are visible to the world, you are free to change either or both. To change your profile image, go to your own profile and select 'Edit profile icon'. You can replace it with any image you like (assuming you have legal rights to use it). To change your name, go to 'My Account' and change the name to whatever you wish (but keep it decent!). Note that we still know who you are: this does not change your login name. If you do choose to reveal anything at any point, it may occasionally reveal your login ID to whoever you choose to reveal it, because of how folder names are stored. 

An important aside about changing email addresses:

You may also use 'My account' to change your email address but do please ensure that it is a real account that you are able to access. No one will be able to see your email address unless you explicitly share it with them via your profile, but it is needed by the Landing to send system messages. If you set this to an address that fails, you may find parts of the Landing cease to work or even that it stops working for you altogether.  With the exception of extremely rare major system announcements (we have made none so far in the 18 months the site has been running) or when the Landing team needs to contact you (notably if there is a problem with your account) you may control whether and how you receive such messages, and for what reasons.  See Controlling email notifications for further details.