Over the last few days I have received several emails from Substack telling me that I have new subscribers. Wait … what? I don’t have a newsletter, and I have never commented on a Substack post. But it seems that my Substack profile is public, and I guess anyone who searches for my name will find me — and the newsletters I subscribe to. I had no idea. 

Now, it seems that I can choose which of my subscriptions to show on my profile — though the default is to show all of them, and you have to toggle that off one at a time — but there appears to be no way to make my entire profile private. I say “appears” because I cannot find a help document that addresses this issue, and Substack makes no email address available to those who need assistance for matters not covered on their help pages. 

All of this is really bad form, I think, so: account canceled. I might start a new account (with a different email address) to see if I can build in more privacy from the start, but I dunno … I’m getting closer and closer to an “open web or nothing” position.