In addition to sharing information within my company, we would like to use Confluence for sharing certain information with our customers and clients, and have it host our public website. The one thing that is holding us back from doing this is the inability to restrict who can see a user's profile. Profiles can even be viewed by anonymous users and to my knowledge there is no way to create a named user account without also creating a profile. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. In our case, many of our clients are also direct competitors, and the last thing we want to do is give them a list of all our employees. The same concern also applies to the names at the top of each page, on the dashboard, in the search results, etc., that tell you who last changed the page and at what date and time.

I tried to come up with couple of ideas about how restriction of user profiles and user names might work. My preferred solution by far is number one but it may also be the most difficult to implement.

1. A user is only allowed to see the name and profile of another user if they are in the same group. (at least one group, not all)

2. Allow a global administrative option for enabling/disabling user names and profiles.

3. Allow each user to decide whether their name and/or profile should be viewable.

I think that this feature would be useful for many people, although I don't want to speak for other customers. Having such a feature would certainly allow the product to penetrate many more areas of my company.