Your Navigatr profile, your badge pages and your pathway pages are public by default, so anyone with the link can open them. If you would rather they were not, one setting makes your profile private and closes them to everyone but you.
Profile visibility is a single checkbox. This article covers where it lives, what other people see once it is on, and what stays visible either way.
Making your profile private
You can change this at any time. The change is saved as soon as you tick the box.
Sign in to Navigatr and open Settings from your account menu.
Choose Data & Privacy from the settings menu.
Under Privacy Settings, tick the Make my profile private checkbox.
Clear the same checkbox to make your profile public again.
While your profile is private, the Share button on your own profile, badge and pathway pages is replaced by a lock icon. Select it to come straight back to this setting.
Important note: Anyone who already has a link to your profile, or to one of your badges or pathways, will no longer be able to open it. Sites you have shared to, such as LinkedIn, may keep showing the old preview until they next check the link.
What other people see
Someone who opens your profile, or a badge or pathway page belonging to you, sees a short page saying the profile is private. That page offers a way on to the badge or the pathway itself, so a link you shared earlier is not a dead end. For what a public profile shows, see Navigating Your Profile on Navigatr.
The preview that appears when one of your links is posted somewhere becomes a plain Navigatr card, with nothing about you on it. This applies to every way of sharing: see Sharing Your Achievements.
This applies to everyone, including the administrators of any provider or community you belong to. They cannot open your pages while your profile is private. Our support team can still see them, so that we can help you if something goes wrong.
What stays visible
A private profile does not remove you from the organisations you are part of. It closes the pages that are about you.
Badge and pathway pages: the page describing a badge or a pathway stays public, because it is about the credential rather than about any one person.
Member and recipient lists: you still appear in a provider or community's members list, in the recipients of a badge they issued you, and in the participants of a pathway.
Your Open Badges: downloading a badge still works, and a badge you have already shared can still be verified. Your name is withheld from the verification result while your profile is private.
If your organisation set this for you
A provider or community can choose that the accounts it creates start private. If your account was set up for you, it may have been private from the moment it was made.
We can also set a group of profiles to private when an organisation asks us to. If that happens to your account, we send you a notification to tell you.
In both cases the setting is yours. You can clear the checkbox and make your profile public whenever you want.
How this differs from the search engine setting
There are two settings in Privacy Settings and they do different things. Neither one changes the other.
Make my profile private: decides who can open your pages at all.
Hide my profile from search engines: decides whether your pages are listed by Google and Bing. Your pages stay public to anyone holding the link.
If search results are your only concern, see Hiding Your Profile From Search Engines.
Tip: If you are not sure which of the two settings you need, or a page of yours is still appearing somewhere you did not expect, contact [email protected] and we will help you work it out.