White-Label FAIL: The New Ning

If it wasn't bad enough that our members are already getting spammed to death by member vultures, now Ning have created the "new Ning", and everyone has had a public profile page foisted onto them on the Ning site, whether they want one or not. Everyone is going to have an email sent to them to direct them to their new public Ning profile, whether they knew they were a member of Ning or not, whether they belonged to a white-label site or not, whether they belonged to a public or a private network or not.

When white-label NCs started protesting about this on the network creators site, one of them posted this support response from Ning:

Because you purchased the "Remove Ning Promotional Links" premium service, when your members are on your social network, they wont in any way be directed to or linked to their activity feed on Ning.com. This behavior remains unchanged from today.

Today, if your members were to go to Ning.com on their own and entered the name of your social network in our search box, your social network would appear in our search results. Additionally, if they were to sign in to Ning.com with their Ning ID, they would see that they are a member of your social network and any other social networks of which they are a member. With the new Ning.com, the only change to this behavior is that members will be able to see the activity across all of the social networks of which they are members and we will provide recommendations of new networks for them to join. Network Creators' Signature Campaign Thread

This isn't quite the truth as it stands. They left out the bit where everyone can see everyone else's profile on Ning and everyone who signs up to your white-label site has a public profile on Ning.

What does "they wont in any way be directed to or linked to their activity feed on Ning.com" actually mean? Does this mean white-label members won't get an email sent out? Or are they just talking about putting loads of links into the free networks to show your member feed on Ning?

What happens if the signature campaign is successful, and white-label members don't get an email sent to them? Not sending out the email is not the solution. You simply can't leave people with a public profile on display that they don't even know about. It's a privacy and security nightmare.

How Ning can help:

DO NOT set up profiles for members of white-label sites on Ning.com until members find Ning by themselves!