Attendee privacy controls

Networking features run on exposure — people finding each other — and privacy controls are how you make that exposure consensual. The commercial tension is real: every attendee who hides their profile shrinks the matchmaking pool and thins the attendee directory exhibitors paid to access. But the alternative is worse. Attendees who feel exposed without consent complain publicly, escalate to legal, or simply refuse the app entirely, and under GDPR-style regimes, making personal profiles visible to all participants without a genuine choice isn't a design decision, it's a compliance problem. In practice, organizers should know their platform's defaults cold: what a brand-new registrant's profile shows, who can message them, whether opt-out is one tap or buried five menus deep. The defensible default for business events is usually "visible to participants, contactable through the platform, contact details hidden until the attendee shares them" — discoverability without exposure. The common mistake is treating privacy settings as a checkbox the vendor handles, then learning the actual defaults from an angry attendee email mid-show. One honest nuance: vendors design defaults for engagement metrics, because visible profiles make their platform look livelier. Their default and your risk position aren't the same thing — review it deliberately, with whoever owns data protection in the room.