Hi Roy, thank you for the reply!
I’ll reply to each of points by quoting them and then replying to each one.
A user can opt out of the site’s community, which will make their account private, and as a result not discoverable through any Wix API. (including the Members/PublicData collection)
Yes, most websites (the basic ones) uses the default signup on lightbox, however, advanced and custom websites do not, which discarded this point completely in these cases, and if it’s public by default, then the user will have no choice but to go to their profile and set it to private, which takes us to your the second point.
After signup, a member can go into their profile and set their profile as private, if they haven’t done so already during the signup process.
As mentioned in the previous point, this is only applicable if the site allows its users to access their - default - wix profile, which as we all know, not applicable to cases where the site has a custom-built members area.
As of know, and AFAIK, there is no API to control this behavior.
And even if the users can change their profile exposure, still, having a public database of any data, especially about the number of the site members, can be a significant privacy concern, especially if competitors can see these data.
Being on a public databse means your name is publically indexed, I use Twitter, but I don’t want anyone to search Twitter’s members database for my name, and if I’m the site owner, I wouldn’t prefer my site’s - public - members number to be public.