Private journals - disturbing finding

[wishforchange]

I have earlier today contacted Medhelp directly about this, then spent a great deal of time reclaiming my privacy.  Here is the problem.

On our private journal pages, we can choose our privacy setting, eg. for everyone to see, just friends, or private.  Mostly my journals are available for a short time only to my friends, then made entirely private.  But I wanted to check the privacy setting was working.  

So earlier today I logged out, then without logging in typed my username in the search box.  Up came my posts, as expected, and then below them ALL my journals.  With the title and first couple of sentences available to view by anyone who happened upon them.  These were jounals which I had chosen only to be viewed only by myself, or some by friends only.  I was shocked and contacted medhelp.

I have information in these journals that I want to keep.  So I had to note all the journal entries publically displayed (i.e. all of them), log back in, change the title of each to a generic title, and then decide how to stop the first few sentances being displayed.  I did this by pressing the space bar for about six lines before the start of the journal entry.  This seemed to work as since I have logged out and rechecked my journals, and they are now unreadable to those not chosen by me.

Please, if you want your journals to be entirely private, or for a limited audience, I suggest you do similar.

Medhelp -  this is a serious breach of privacy and I am very unhappy that for months now my most private information, sometimes displayed in those first few sentences, has been publically available, against my preferences.  You really must change your technical system for dealing with privacy settings on journals, so that once we have chosen absolute privacy that is exactly what we get.  

I will keep an eye on this, and may delete my journals ultimately.  It seems that until this is resolved this websitsite is best used for publically viewed posts only.  However, like me, there are many here who confide and depend on the facilites you offer outside the public forums, so to breach our trust in this area is very bad.  Please resolve this so we can relax again in our private journals.  I am just glad I eventually found out this error.

If I sound annoyed it is because I am.  I had other plans for this afternoon, but felt the need to spend this time restoring my privacy, and having made a lot of entries it took a long time.  Not happy at all about this.

[Med Help]

Hi,

This is a bug that we discovered last week, and we will have fixed by this weekend. However, please realize, even though it appears in the search result, no one that is unable to view the journal can click into it and see the journal. The issue is with the search results, accidentally listing these journals, but members are still blocked from viewing the journal. If you'd like to test it, log out and run the search. When you try to click into the journal you will not be able to see it.

We're sorry for the issue, but we're working to correct it as soon as possible. We take privacy very seriously, which is why we have put all of the controls in to begin with.

MedHelp

[wishforchange]

Please, if you value your privacy, re-read my post!  I had chosen absolute privacy on my journals by hitting the blue button on the bottom.  I then logged out and then, still logged out, as an outsider, typed my username in the searchbox.  Beneath my posts all the titles of all my journals came up, along with the first few sentences.  Try it for yourself with your own journals.  Choose an entry, make it private, log out, type your username in the searchbox whilst still logged out, see your posts come up, and at the bottom of the page your journals will be listed with the first few sentances, including the ones you marked private.  They will be there, unless I'm the only user this is happening to.
Thought I made it clear in my post, please test this out for yourself if you are in doubt.

Medhelp - you please need to rectify this.  I for one will not be posting in my journals now and although I have restored my privacy with the space bar, this should not be necessary.   How about if you cannot change this technically at least putting a warning and advice tab to tell people to make the first few lines just blank spaces if they want privacy?  Wasted a whole Sunday afternoon on this going through each post and changing the title and putting spaces for the first few lines.  What a good thing I discovered it.  

This is a medical website, and inevitably people share and confide personal problems.  We need to be assured of the authenticity of the security settings to make this work.  This is a very serious breach.

[TrudieC]

If you go into your journal and hit edit, at the bottom you will see in blue the word Privacy?.  Click on this and you can change the security for that journal to everyone, just your friends or just me.

[irrelevance]

I want to add from a suggestion from another poster on a journal of mine, that you should be able to make CERTAIN journals private or viewable by friends only. I'm not sure if you can do this, but I looked a bit and did not see a way, but perhaps only to change the whole privacy settings rather than individual ones. If you can in fact do this, it should be a simpler command on the "Write new journal" page.

[MJIthewriter]

To add to that if you have any photos they will show up under google if you look-up your username. Even if you set them for friends only they may still show up, but at least the image won't.  That's why I have most of my artwork set to "friends only"

Journals also show up on google...

[Sunes]

I had a  situation with my PM messages....one of my friends send me and other users info on alternative treatments and apparently he was reported to MedHelp by someone   for spamming !!! and guess what? my email from him was deleted from my PM box . PM box should be strictly private and only I  should be  able to delete any messages from mailbox. That is a major breach of privacy...if they can do that? your journals are not safe at all or pictures marked for friends only.
Contacted MedHelp and they informed me that I must have reported this email as spam. I DID NOT. There is so many people helping with issues on forums that I  could not get anymore answers from them everytime I enquired I got a generic messages back. . I had to  stop sending important info through MedHelp site .
Lots of things on MedHelp malfunctions but it's up to them to fix it if we report them quickly.
Sunes.

[MJIthewriter]

I noticed that too and it disturbed me as well.  One thing you can try doing is adding a lot of space before your message.  I'm trying that with some of mine.