I think we all realize that this place has privacy holes but it is still disturbing when you step in one. I have followed a few people whose posts I enjoy but it did feel stalkerish so I stopped.

I would email and complain. You should be able to choose if others can follow you but I don't see that as an option.

I don't think they follow me because they enjoy my rare post, somehow they looked me up first and started following me, Its too much of a coincidence that all the others they follow are from this very same area where we all live!

They don't have to do anything, but hover over your name if you post. Hover over mine and you will see a link to "follow". Click on it and you are following someone.

If you click on "your houzz" in the top right, you will go to your home page. At the left you will see "followers" and " following". I don't have any right now, but you can go to the followers and click on them and delete.

Cran, you have three followers and you are following one. You do not have messaging activated. Of course Houzz is not private. It is a public forum and anyone can just google and come here.

The only reason why I am following anyone is because I am trying to delete them. It won't let me delete my followers. My point being these two followers did not" hover" over my name. I am sure they looked me and the 70 other people who are friends and neighbors some other way.

I just looked at my profile and apparently I'm following 41 people!!!! I absolutely do not recall ever initiating any following of anyone. I'm going to turn off following completely thanks to the instructions writesblock just supplied. Thank you, writersblock.

Alas, that just keeps people from following you. It doesn't affect your ability to follow other people. Those you will have to undo one by one, I'm afraid.

Yes, I just realized that when I went to make the change.

Thank you writers, I have changed my settings. I felt very uncomfortable knowing my neighbors were following me.

If your Houzz account is linked to your FB account that might explain why people you know in real life — and are FB friends with — are following you here, too.

This is not related to followers but I will mention it anyway. A little while ago I participated in a conversation in hot topics about the Florida school shooting. There was a poster who apparently didn't like what I was saying, he was responding to most of my posts, kind of trolling me. This poster evidently is known to be questionable, I don't really want to get into why. I don't often read or post to hot topics so he was not familiar to me at the time. During the conversation, someone alerted me to look at my profile as it seemed there was something fishy going on. When I did, I saw that in the section where you can list your interests, or something similar, someone had added some very obscene stuff. I reported it to houzz, but honestly I don't think they seemed very concerned/interested. So how did someone access my profile? I deleted my account. I reopened it last week because there was something I wanted to post but I will be deleting it again.

I set up my houzz account prior to the switchover from GW so my account is linked to my email address which was also linked to my FB account. I have followers from my real world too. No, they didn't go looking for me. Houzz is social media-- and just like other social media, they try to link us up to people on our friends list who are also Houzz members.

It's social media. It tries to make connections by design. I am not saying that it's desirable but I am saying if you have a number of social media accounts you need to be aware of how they are linking together.

Linked In uses my email address book to try to make connections. I keep getting suggestions to connect with a interviewer who declined to offer me a position after numerous interviews and a few months of emails back and forth. grrr!

Hi All, Looks like someone pointed out the setting to disallow followers on your profile, and that is great.

There are many ways someone might find and follow you. You can search the directory by name, connect your facebook or google account, or just happen to see you participating in discussions. If you are not comfortable having followers, it's a great solution to turn that option off on your profile.

For @gail - It is very important to make sure you use a unique password and username / email on different sites you may use. Houzz has not had any security issues, however other sites on the internet have, and sometimes that information is posted online. When that happens, spammers will take advantage of those lists and try the same log in information on every site they can find. If you found something obscene on your profile, it is much more likely that a spammer may have done that than a regular poster on Houzz.

Here is a site where you can see if your email or password may have been posted online through a data breach on another site. https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Also, it goes without saying that if you see your log in has been compromised, change your passwords to something DIFFERENT asap.

Again, I want to emphasize that Houzz has not had a data breach of this kind.

Writersblock, thank you. I have made the changes and will be diligent from now on.

Years ago, when there was a larger %age of meaner people, someone copied screen shots and demonstrated that I had apparently "Liked" my own posts, and that I was a real phony and all sorts of things.

I had no idea at the time how that happened, so I just said "Why wouldn't I like what I say? And I am going to "like" your posts, too" and Liked every bad thing she said about me for a while.

It was not until much later that I realized that when I was checking to see who liked some of my post I was inadvertently liking them myself, accidentally.

Not that I am saying your followers are inadvertent, just that I know I have inadvertently done things.

I reported it to houzz, but honestly I don't think they seemed very concerned/interested. So how did someone access my profile? I deleted my account. I reopened it last week because there was something I wanted to post but I will be deleting it again.

A similar thing happened to another Hot Topics participant. A number of us reported it, but Houzz showed no concern. In that case the member's profile name was hijacked. Houzz allows duplicate names for some unknown reason. Not a good way to run a website.

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There was a poster who apparently didn't like what I was saying, he was responding to most of my posts, kind of trolling me. This poster evidently is known to be questionable, I don't really want to get into why.

He's had many incarnations. Last count was 13. In Spike's days he would have been spinning in the tea cups after the second.

Cran, since you say you are a lurker, why not delete this profile entirely and start a new one with a different name?

It is extremely easy to "follow" someone inadvertently. I know because I have done it any number of times just while clicking on a post.....get that cursor in the wrong place for a sec and click and voila!!....all of a sudden you are following Jane Doe or Dudley Doright or whoever. You can very easily delete or 'unfollow' whoever you might have clicked on to follow in error. But you cannot delete your own followers. Deactivating that option in your profile - as Emily H (a Houzz administrator) - has indicated her response above is the way to go about ridding yourself of any online "stalkers".

And I say "stalkers" very much tongue in cheek!! They are NOT stalking you and in fact have no way of knowing where or when you post. The "following" option is more like a "like" button for a particular poster....not just a post or comment. On the Garden side of the forums where I hang out most of the time, very popular or knowledgeable posters that are valuable contributors have many followers. But unless they look at their own profile regularly, they may never know they are being followed by anyone. It is just not obvious to the member being followed - no obvious signs while participating - nor does it give your followers (either intentional or inadvertent) any indication of where or when you post. (Note: I used to get notifications of new followers but that feature vanished about 35 followers back :-))

As to privacy issues, as long as you don't use your real name and don't divulge any details about specific location, you are about as private here as you can be anywhere online. Deactivating the messaging and following features will provide even greater privacy. I do not belong to Facebook or any other social media so have no idea how those might link up with Houzz but I know they do and IMO, that would be the most likely source of any privacy concerns.

Several months ago on Hot Topics some *lovely* person referred to me by my real name, which I have never published here. I found out she took it from the http address bar to my profile. My name is in my email address, and Houzz used my email name as my default user name, I assume. When we merged, my email name showed up in the http address bar here on the merged GW/Houzz. I had no idea that my real name was visible for over two years.

When I look at the http address bar for your profile, cran, your real first name is the user name. On the Account Information page in our profiles, the name in the user name box is the name that shows in the http address bar. You want to edit it so that cran is your user name.

I hope I'm explaining it clearly--I'm not real tech savvy.

Before I changed it, it said:

https://www.houzz.com/user/janedoe (but my real first and last names)

Upon discovering it, I edited it in my settings to read:

https://www.houzz.com/user/mayflowers1

I've randomly looked at other profiles and have seen a few where their real name is in the http address bar but they've selected a different display name, and I assume they have no idea their real name is being shown on their profile page in the address bar.

Thank you mayflowers, I think my "friend" may have looked me up by my name or email, just thought I was invisible here!! I will do as eld161 suggested and change my profile entirely.

I've followed people accidentally by hitting the button. I will un-follow them as soon as I notice the error. I have never intentionally followed anyone.

I also have all my Ideabooks private, so it looks like I have zero Ideabooks. I have many of them, but don't see why anyone would need to see what photos I am saving. I also make my Ideabook comments private.

I add my thanks to writersblock for the instructions, I just turned off followers too--after being shocked to see I had some! Clearly a connection to my FB account but still a bit startling.

mayflowers, thanks for that info. I double-checked to make sure that my real name is not in the address bar. it looks like it is showing my user name.

However, I do have two different email addresses. One uses my real name and is what I use in my daily life for personal email. Then I have a yahoo email account that I use for online shopping, any websites that I visit like Gardenweb, places that ask for an email address but I don't want to be sold, etc. I only look at that one a couple of times a week - it's mainly marketing emails from places I shop, and random other unimportant email that I quickly skim and basically just delete in one big swoop.

On a different note, while I do have a FB account, I have as many privacy measures in place as offered. I never use it to log in to other websites. When that breech happened, I followed all the instructions for locking down my privacy but found that my account was already locked up pretty tightly. Dh works in open source risk management and therefore will not use any social media at all - for one of their clients, they once showed how easily it was to show a 24 hour period of the CEO's daughter based on her social media footprint (checking in on FB at a bar she was at, etc). That's just one easy example but they easily access lots of other open source data that most people don't realize is out there.