On Privacy

Online privacy is a serious thing. People take how much they reveal of themselves online very seriously, and quite rightly too.

Privacy is important to us at NerdAbility as well. From the start, we have been upfront with where we stand - your NerdAbility profile is a public profile to the world of just how awesome you are, its not somewhere where people will upload photos of compromising situations, or share trade secrets, its a place where people say, hey, I have my blog, and my StackOverflow profile, and my GitHub profile.. why can't i just bring them to one place, so rather than hoping a potential employer googles me, I can just say, check me out!

After all, NerdAbility doesn't expose anything that is already private on the web to anyone - it only shows already publicly accessible data (GitHub, StackOverflow, BitBucket, Blogs - all public data only).  When we recently rolled out the BitBucket integration, on first launch, we were alerted that private repositories were being displayed - this wasn't something we had done intentionally, it was actually because making anonymous, unauthenticated calls to the BB API returns private data too (we know, crazy right?) - but this is important to us, as well as to you guys, so as soon as we were alerted, we put in an emergency fix it and released within an hour.

So, why are we going on about all this stuff? The reason is, pretty soon we will be rolling out user search, making it much easier for people to discover just how awesome you are (searching by name or by skills) - so we just wanted to make sure we are all on the same page.

If you still have concerns, fear not, we know this is a hugely important and sensitive subject, so despite NerdAbility only showing publicly available data, we will also be adding a privacy option, allowing you to opt-out of the search results!