Propose new functionalities for Decidim software
#DecidimRoadmap Designing Decidim together
**Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.**
Some users are very cautious about their privacy and currently in Decidim it is not possible to create private user accounts. Once you create an account on the platform, it is public and available for everyone's eyes.
The person searching their name in Google (or other search engines) will find results on the Decidim platform. Some people are extremely worried about this functionality and some will even refuse to participate unless they can do it privately.
**Describe the solution you'd like**
I'd like to be able to configure whether the public profiles functionality is active or disabled on the platform. When disabled, the public profiles would not be accessible on the platform.
Other possibility would be that this is configurable through the profile settings and the system administrator could decide the default (public or private).
After the discussion below, it would be also required that the person's name is hidden in all activities that they have done on the platform. This would apply e.g. to the profile badge in comments and proposals as well as the data exports and the API where the name would appear. In case the participant wants to remain anonymous, we could show e.g. "Participant 123" instead of the name in their profile.
**Describe alternatives you've considered**
Creating a customization per instance but this exact same request comes to us every other month now, so I think it would be sensible to consider how to solve this properly.
Given the proposed functionality, this could be also a setting per profile but in that case it should be disabled by default and only if the user wants, their profile would become public.
**Additional context**
Especially in Finland people can be extremely cautious about entering their details into any web platforms or having their name appear on public websites where other people can inspect what their neighbor is doing.
Some people feel this is a violation of their personal privacy.
**Does this issue could impact on users private data?**
Yes, it has a positive impact on users' private data as their private data won't become publicly visible on a website without them having full control over it.
**Funded by**
We can possibly find funding for this if it is agreed on.
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The first point I would very much support, this would indeed solve the described problem for the direct registration users.
For the oauth options, we could default to not saving the name but it is a necessary field and without it, the user record won't save. Also, I believe the nickname is automatically generated from the name right now and if we remove the name, the users would have to create their nickname on the platform. Imagine the confusion the user would get when they come ONLY for PB voting and the system asks their nickname... I don't think this would be good either.
I really think it would be very beneficial to have the "privacy" options available under the user profile where they could decide e.g. about the visibility of the public profile (and default it to hidden or make the defaults configurable for admins). We could fork the user related functionality to its own module but it's not easy to manage in a module because we would have to override parts of the user model, user forms and the user views. This sort of stuff that strongly relates to existing core functionality is quite hacky to put in a module. + it becomes hard to manage every time there are core changes related to the users.
If you strongly feel in @product that the publicity of the profiles is a must in Decidim, I would really want to open the conversation further into how can we make it so that it wouldn't have any effect in the current functionality in instances by default but for system administrators we could add options to add these privacy options available for the users.
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