This article originated from a customer question.
Problem
Is there currently any way to allow registered users to set their own privacy level of their activity messages? Basically an option to make them only visible to friends versus visible to all.
If not, is there a suggested approach on how to modify the platform to have this feature?
Solution
Activity messages have the same privacy level as the "places" where the activities occurred.
For example, if a users posts in a public group, that post is visible to all users on the site. So is the activity message about that post.
If a user posted in a private, that post is only visible to other members of that group. The same is true about the activity message.
In short--if you post in private areas, your activities are private, if you post in public areas, they are public.
A workaround is to customize the Activity Message list widget to hide the 'All' tab and to only display messages from friends. The recommended approach is to build a new widget to provide this functionality.