I did not opt-in to Atlassian's community. How do I opt-out?

[Public name is required]

I am required to use Jira boards through my employer. I do not want my information shown publicly. I did not opt-in to any use of my private information. How do I opt-out?

I do not want to be gamified with badges for doing work. I do not want anything publicly visible at all.

[Angélica Luz]

Hi Keith,

Thanks for reaching out to Community!
I just would like to confirm before doing any changes, do you want to delete your community account?
There is no option for you to delete, so please let us know if this is what you need so we can do this for you.

Regards,
Angélica

[Public name is required]

Hi Angelica,

I'm sure you can understand that I am quite frustrated.

Before I can answer your question: I need to understand what the difference is between this Atlassian Community account and my Jira account.

I don't recall ever signing up for Atlassian Community. Is it the same account?

Thanks

[Angélica Luz]

If you are using the same Atlassian Account that you use on your instance, it will pull the information from id.atlassian.com, it means that you used the same account to log in on Community.

We can disable your community account, it won't affect your access to any other Atlassian product, then when you have a question about our products, you can create a new account with a personal email, so you can change your full name to an alias, for example.

May we remove your account from community?

[Public name is required]

Hi Angelica,

So you're telling me that Community automatically pulls private information (my first and last name, which is needed for my employer's satisfaction) and displays it without my consent?

Will removing my account from Community prevent me from getting help when I need it?

For example: for close to a year, Atlassian has refused to log itself in using my browser on my workstation which enforces strict content security policies which means that Atlassian's use of a half dozen domain names _just to log in_ breaks. I have to start a separate, dedicated, VM and remote into that to enforce proper site isolation. I can't even report that as an issue because the issue reporter is also broken in the same fashion.

I wonder how many other people are forced to enable insecure options in their workstation browser because they can't (or don't know how to) set up a dedicated virtual machine just to use Atlassian's products and Atlassian's own advice is to enable insecure features?

[Angélica Luz]

Hi Keith,

You can check our article for more detailed information about why community shows your full name:
- Usernames, privacy, alter egos, and you

Will removing my account from Community prevent me from getting help when I need it?
- No, you just need to create a new account with an email that you don't use on another Atlassian products, so you can change the full name.

We have a feature request suggesting to have an option to set an alias to use on community:
- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/COMMUNITY-3500

Regards,
Angélica

[Public name is required]

Hi @Angélica Luz 

Thank you for your follow-up. I'm not very satisfied though.

First, the page you described instructs the user to go to id.atlassian.com and change their "Full Name (not Public Name!)". However, there is no Public Name field. Moreover, I don't want to change my name. I don't want my name *visible*. I don't want *anything about me* publicly visible at all.

You've also completely missed the second point of my original message at the start of this. I specifically said: _*I do not want to be gamified with badges for doing work.*_

So let me be abundantly clear: I very much do not appreciate Atlassian's scope-creep style of working its way into and begging for my attention for anything not directly related to work.

* **I did not volunteer, opt-in, or ask for any participation trophies.**
* **I should not have to opt-out of something I did not opt-in to.**
* My email costs time (money) to sort and make efficient. Populating it with an attention grab makes Community feel like yet another gamified social media. I am at work _to do work_; my job description does not include participation in Atlassian Community.
* **Marking the email notifications as spam (I didn't ask for them) and phishing (asking me to sign in to a site I don't recognize as legitimate) will likely poorly affect real notifications from Atlassian related to my work.**
* A Community account should neither be required nor automatically created in order to view documentation or announcements which were advertised while using other Atlassian products.
* Reading documentation or announcements should not trigger an email congratulating me on participating in the community.
* I do not appreciate my tools (email and Jira) needlessly demanding my attention, such as for participation trophies.

I have provided feedback to Atlassian on multiple occasions prior to the change last year which nuked my ability to even use Atlassian's products outside of a dedicated VM. I have never been contacted about my feedback. That combined with the fact that Atlassian products do not work with secure browser settings, and also combined with this event makes me believe that Atlassian does not care about the people, or privacy thereof, using its products.

[Monique vdB]

@Public name is required I hear you on this. On the community side, we're working on a solution that will let you control this better, specifically the display of your full name. In the meantime you can choose to use an alias as @He Who Shall Not Be Named has done but it will change everywhere. 

In the meantime you can turn off all notifications from community on your settings page which will disable badge notifications as well. 

[Public name is required]

Hi @Monique vdB 

Thank you for the information. I didn't know about this screen. It definitely feels hidden.

After looking over the settings: another notification that I think is pointless for developer productivity would be "Likes". The other notifications are typical (somebody *else* did something that might need my attention) and fine to receive.

[Nobody]

June 3rd and still no way to make your own profile and info private. I can't even change my full name because it's managed by organization, public name field doesn't mean anything profile privacy doesn't mean anything, you're literally doxxing people for MONTHS, are you even in your right mind?

[Public name is required]

Hi @Monique vdB and @Angélica Luz  , I saw a notification from COMMUNITY-3500. That doesn't seem to be publicly available and I don't appreciate being tagged on something I can't see. That's an issue too. However, Angelica mentioned that COMMUNITY-3500 is aimed to address my complaint and the notification I got from COMMINITY-3500 indicates that the feature is deployed as of July 15th.

I am sure you can understand that I've tried to have a lot of patience for this, having waited several months for my issues to be actioned. I am a developer too. I can understand how writing software is hard and some features can require a lot of work. So I am also sure you can understand that I was excited to explore the feature and turn off the public-visibility aspects of it. And I am sure you can also understand my frustration when I discovered that it doesn't work.

Adding a "Public Name" field makes sense to allow me to create or use a public pseudonym. I like that idea. But the whole point of my complaint is that my information should not be publicly visible. That includes private information such as my Full Name, Job title, Department, and Organization. Interestingly, my location and timezone information can be changed to "Only you" (me).

Several fields offering private information in my profile are set to "Anyone" can see it. Their visibility menus are greyed out so I cannot change them. This is a problem.

Literally the only thing that an app should need would be an account ID, which should be something automatically generated by Atlassian. I should be able to decline providing any other information whatsoever.

I should not be required to provide information, beyond an account ID automatically generated by Atlassian, to an application. Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have demonstrated how that information can be abused by applications. Preferably, I should be able to choose which applications have that access rather than having a blanket statement for all applications.

I absolutely should not be required to make any information visible to the public. People frequently behave poorly. Sometimes they do it intentionally. People with technical knowledge can easily retrieve large amounts of "public" information and abuse it.

I don't understand how to be more clear on these points. I don't understand why my location can be made private but the rest of my information cannot.

@Monique vdByour comment in COMMUNITY-3500 indicates that the feature is delivered as of July 15th. I have to contend that the feature has not been delivered.

[Monique vdB]

@Public name is required what you're seeing is a link to an issue from our old public Jira -- I'm not sure why you're unable to see it, as it's intended to be public. I'll look into that!

The privacy feature was delivered for community -- we don't make any of those fields public, although we did pull in full names automatically until adding the nickname option on July 15. 

It sounds like you have an issue with how Atlassian ID is handled on the product level, is that correct? I can loop in the right team to help address your concerns, but not sure where your information is actually being exposed. 

[Public name is required]

Hi @Monique vdB ,

The "old public Jira" wants me to log in and associate my Atlassian account with the public Jira. I do not wish to do so for the very same reasons that this thread was created.

There seems to be a disconnect. Maybe the privacy feature was delivered "for" community, but it should be applied to all products. Moreover, the privacy feature is broken: it does not allow me to make everything private. Let me show you. Here's what's visible about me from the perspective of an anonymous person:

As you can see, my name is clearly visible. Despite my name being visible, it's accessed using an ID automatically generated by Atlassian (2946450).

If I want to change that, I assume I'd need to do that from my profile. When I click on my profile icon in the top right of my logged-in page and then click "View profile", it brings me to the following page:



Nowhere on that page can I change any privacy settings for my full name. I can't even change what my full name is from there. There's no information about a "public name". My email is displayed on that page -- I've obfuscated it in the screenshot of course. I can't change it. Keep in mind that I neither signed up for Community nor gave permission for Atlassian to display or use my full name -- remember that's exactly what I complained about at the beginning of this thread.

So firstly, my full name is publicly visible in Community but I am not able to control that in Community's settings. I don't want Community to have access to my full name anyway though. So let's move on to what happens when I click "Edit in Atlassian account":



On my Atlassian ID page, I cannot change the publicity of my information. It's greyed out just as I said in my previous message. When I click on it, nothing happens; no menu pops up, no new page loads, nothing.

If that makes this the problem of another team then indeed please loop them in here.

[Monique vdB]

@Public name is required so it looks like you did figure out how to update your public name, so that's good at least! 

In the meantime, thanks so much for walking me through your use case.The reason everything is grayed out is, I believe, due to the administrator of your Atlassian instance.  It seems like your account is managed by them and they have removed the ability for you to change these settings. I'm copying @Daniel Eads who may be able to verify this and will correct me if I'm wrong. 

[AS]

It is 2021, and this is still an issue. Changing my "Display Name" but cant opt to "hide" or have any control over my personal information that is pulled through to Community from my Jira account, seems completly wrong.

The options for me are greyed out.

When will this be properly resolved? Users must have some ownership over their private information being made public.

[He Who Shall Not Be Named]

Hi Keith,

I believe you are using the Cloud JIRA version, which requires an Atlassian ID/account.

An Atlassian account/ID is their single sign-on solution to their suite of Atlassian products.

See: https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/atlassian-account-for-users-873871199.html

You can manage your privacy here: https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/privacy

Apologies if I seem to hi-jack this thread, but I also share some privacy concerns with Keith.

Although I've updated my full name to a different one, it doesn't seem to reflect on existing posts created by my account.

@Angélica Luz : What actions can I take to replace/scrub my name from existing posts without fully deleting the account?

[He Who Shall Not Be Named]

Please ignore my trouble, as it seems a simple login/logout is required for the change to be reflected accordingly.

[Public name is required]

Yes my company is using Atlassian's cloud product. Despite that, I absolutely did not and do not consent to making any of my information publicly available. That includes my name.

I feel effectively helpless.