Privacy & safety concern: Mark all old entries as private should be free?

[iamsosmart]

Title:
Privacy & safety concern: Mark all old entries as private should be free?

Area:
Entry privacy

Summary:
Instead of requiring a paid account to set all past or newly imported entries to private, Dreamwidth should offer it as a free option to help protect the privacy and online safety of users. (Caveats below.)

Description:
Currently Dreamwidth only offers free users the ability to set the privacy of all NEW entries to "access list only" or "just me (private)". It is also impossible to set a single privacy level for imported entries as they're being brought in; by default they retain their privacy settings from the original source journal.

This can be a problem, particularly with older journals (imported or otherwise) where, in the past, the user wasn't as careful with the sharing of personal information as they should have been. It can also be an issue if a user suddenly has someone harassing them (online or offline) over the content of their journal and they wish to hide it, or if they wish to privatize their content for any other reason (such as worrying that a new employer may be Googling them, or being found by a family member).

In cases like these, the only option for the user in question is to delete their journal, or to go back and manually change the privacy of each and every public journal entry. For established journals, or journal compiled from a number of imported journals, this just isn't feasible, which isn't really fair or reasonable considering that the user in question may already be very anxious and the situation may be urgent.

Users should have the right to be able to privatize all of their entries quickly. On the other hand, I realize that there are processing and data concerns, and that Dreamwidth has costs to manage.

So my proposal is this: offer free users the option to set all of their past entries to private, once.

However this may, potentially, present problems for users who set their privacy and then later import a journal with entries they also wish to lock. In light of that, offering tokens for mass entry locks, offering the option of setting a single privacy setting for imported entries, or imposing a frequency restriction for mass entry locks (such as one request per three months) might be acceptable. denise has kindly pointed out to me that this can be done - setting a minimum journal privacy before importing automatically makes all newly imported entries match that privacy setting. That leaves only the issue of locking existing entries.

If there are logistical problems to implementing this, I would be curious to know them. I'm a programmer myself and may be able to offer assistance or insight. :)

Poll #5605 Privacy & safety concern: Mark all old entries as private should be free?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 60

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This suggestion:

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Should be implemented as-is.
22 (36.7%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
22 (36.7%)

(I have no opinion)
16 (26.7%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[matgb]

make a user-triggered mode that uses roughly the same or a similar mechanism to suspension

This is sort of what I was thinking along the lines of, but didn't know enough about it to really figure out a spec.

Sometimes, people feel the need to shut down their journal, or to very quickly remove stuff from display; friend of mine had to do this this very week (on LJ, but same principle). They don't want to delete the journal, and sometimes can't be paid.

Some sort of "oh gods, I need to hide everything then sort out all entries referring to X" might be a very useful function. And there's a big part of me that wants it to be available to all users--my friend has cash flow problems and had to ask someone to pay for her account, she knew she could and people would. Said problems will be over very very soon, which is part of the reason for her urgent need to cut stuff written when she was 16/17...