[fardo]

This feels like it should be a non-controversy.

Even being uncharitable, a big off-by-default checkbox saying “make this discoverable in web searches” is roughly as explicit as you can possibly make this feature textually, assuming your users will be applying any reading comprehension.

If they’re not, no further warnings were going to save them, so short of removing the feature or gating it behind increasingly elaborate “if only you knew better!” emails or pop-up modals they also presumably would not be reading, this was the likely outcome.

At some point, I don’t feel bad saying this is a user-side PEBKAC, and that more alerting would be a waste of time.