Privacy settings can be difficult to understand. We really want to make sure that everyone can easily control what aspects of their Mendeley activity are visible and to whom. Towards that end, we have added more granular privacy settings where you can specify what parts of your profile should be visible to each of three categories: Everyone, My Contacts, Only Me. Shown are the settings you can now choose and below I’ve described how they work. Click the picture to go to your privacy settings page.
Profile Information
- Everyone – The information will be displayed publicly on your profile. Both logged-in and not logged in users will be able to see it. If you want to get your work more exposure, this is the setting you want.
- My Contacts – The information will be displayed only to those you’ve added as contacts on Mendeley. The information will not be visible to site visitors who aren’t logged in.
- Only Me – This information will only appear on your profile when you are viewing it while logged in to Mendeley.
Visibility in Search
If search engines can access your profile page, they will only see information that has been set as visible to everyone. If the box isn’t checked, your profile will not be indexed by search engines, but people will still be able to search for you using Mendeley site search.
Collaborative Groups
All documents and updates that are part of collaborative groups will be handled according to the settings of the group.
..and if we ever make things as complicated as the example I linked to in the first paragraph above, someone please stop us!
Mendeley Blog 
Speaking of privacy, I noticed an annoying bug which makes one’s profile picture publicly visible when joining a public group (and thereby automatically accessible to the entire Web and indexed by search engines) even when a profile is set to be visible to Mendeley users only.
Dario, I think that’s the expected behavior. If you’re joining a public group, your name and picture will be displayed like anyone else, but your privacy choices will still be respected for anyone clicking through to your profile. It would be very confusing to have hidden members of a group. Does that make sense?
Hi William, I don’t want to make a big deal about this particular case (identifiable photos of myself circulate already on the Web), but I am not quite sure I agree with the argument that one’s private picture should become public as soon as s/he joins a public group. Why not then my affiliation, my location or other details that I marked as private? To me the minimum information you need to display about members joining public groups is their username and a link to their profile. Whether people can then actually access the *contents* of one’s profile (including photos) by following that link should depend on individual privacy settings. Would you expect LinkedIn to share your photos or other details with everybody as soon as you join a public group? I wouldn’t.
I can understand where you’re coming from. We haven’t had any feedback otherwise, but if it’s important to you, we’ll take it under consideration and see if we can make it work. Either way, if you were surprised by your picture showing up, that means we need to make it more clear what’s going to happen.
> I can understand where you’re coming from
🙂
> we need to make it more clear what’s going to happen.
yeah probably the simplest solution is to add a message alerting people what happens to their profile data when they join a group