Privacy Policies

All user profile properties and most of the My Site features such as Memberships, Colleagues, and Links have privacy policies that restrict who can view them.

You can set policies to restrict who can access and view to:

• You only (Private)

• Your manager (Manager)

• Your workgroup (Organization)

• Your colleagues (Contacts)

• Everyone (Public)

User profile properties have an additional policy (PrivacyPolicy) that specifies whether providing a value for a property is mandatory, disabled, or optional. PrivacyPolicy is only applicable to user profile properties.

When using the object model, privacy policies have the following implications in your code:

• Anyone consuming these features should obey the privacy policy defined for that feature. For example, if Colleagues are not visible to a certain user, you need to hide the Colleague-related functionality in your code for that user.

• Administrators can define their own custom policies.

• Administrators can write new code that can affect privacy. For example, you could write a "My Desktop Software" application with which you could publicly tell everyone you were running Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office Word but make it private that you were running Microsoft Money.

See Also

Other Resources

Configuring the User Profile Store Using the Object Model
Accessing the User Profile Store Using the Object Model