Privacy

Private information is only viewable by you and Beeminder workerbees. Beeminder will not share your goals or data without your consent, and Workerbees will only view your goals when you contact us about them or we are alerted to errors that may result in erroneous charges or non-functional graphs.

Public information can be viewed by anybody who has the URL to your goal or gallery page, though random members' goals can't be easily browsed without that information unless they choose to make their goal featured. We don't have a public list of members or anything like that.

The default setting for new goals is public, with private data. What this means is that anyone can view your graph, but they cannot see your specific datapoint values or comments. As an example of how this looks to someone else, see Nicky's inhaler goal.

You can adjust your default so that new goals are always private by checking the Make private box in your account settings, in the new goal defaults section.

You can change these settings in the Privacy section of the Settings tab below the graph image. Once you've changed the settings, click "Update Privacy" to apply them, and they'll take effect immediately.

Screenshot of the privacy options, including the options to "make this goal private", "make the datapoints public", "show hashtags from comments on the graph" and "make this goal featured - will appear in the featured gallery"

If you want a little extra motivation from the thought that people might be watching your progress on the goal... feature it! Featured goals are listed at beeminder.com/featured, and anyone can browse the gallery and click on the goals there to see more.

Make the datapoints public

By default, even when your graph is public, only the graph image is displayed. If you want people to be able to see the specific, non-aggregated datapoints and comments, then check this option. That will give anyone viewing your goal access to view the most recent datapoints via the Data tab below the graph.

Show hashtags from comments on the graph

This option allows you to include a small caption on the graph on the date of a given datapoint, by typing a hashtag in the datapoint comment. For example: "Reached 50% of my goal today #milestone".

Screenshot of a graph showcasing the hashtag feature, where the hashtag appears in the vertical center, on the date of the datapoint

Make this goal private

Making a goal private hides it from other users, except those with admin rights (Beeminder staff). If someone tries to visit the link, they will see a non-commital error page, the same one they would see when visiting a goal that does not exist. In other words, other users and visitors to your page are not able to tell the difference between a goal that does not exist and a private goal.

Screenshot of the "403.5" error code page: "403.5 not found! what do we mean, 403.5? isn't 404 the "not found" error code? yes, but we're saying "we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of <https://www.beeminder.com/shanaqui/nonexistentgoal>, because you are Forbidden (403) from poking around this user's goalnamespace, you Nosy Neighbor!" Want to learn more about our glomarizing, or just nerd out about web standards? We wrote a blog post about it. If this seems like a mistake on our part, please let us know."

This means that someone who is curious can't just figure out your private goals' names by checking to see if they get a "not found" or a "private goal" error. It's all the same, so they get no more information no matter what they guess.


Keywords: secret goals, privacy settings, farouche, glomar response

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