Quick how-to on creating a maintaining secure ‘private venue’ on Upcoming.

You can create private venues on Upcoming, such that the address of your home or workplace is hidden from the public, but accessible to friends. However, it appears that as soon as you attach that ‘private’ venue to a public event, the details of it become public on the event’s page.

I regard this exposure as a bug (and will file it as such when I get to work on Monday), but you can work around it, and in many respects this is a far more robust way to manage your sensitive venues in a lightweight privacy implementation anyway:

1. Create an entry for your abode with the full address. Describe it as you want. Mark is as viewable to your friends only.
2. Create a second entry for your abode with a name, and ‘Private Venue’ as the street address. Include the correct city name if you’re willing, as that ensures your events will be grouped intothe correct metro, and let people immediately know if they’re going to be in the right town for your shindig. Make this venue public.
3. Set the URL field of this ‘Private Venue’ venue to point directly to the friends-only, full info version. (so, it points to a /venue/12345678 address).
4. Make the private venue discription explain that it’s a private listing and that the viewer must be on your friends list to see the full detail. Instruct them to click the venue URL to see the full details.

Only ever use the ‘Private Venue’ version on your events. The event listing will list ‘Ben’s Flat, Private Venue, San Francisco’ as the location. Clicking on it takes you to a venue page, showing a generic map of your city, the instructions you put in the description, and the link to the protected version.

Non-friends clicking the URL will get a sparse non-access page, friends who click it will see the full address and detailed map.

If you set the Private venue as the location of a public event, you will expose the address publicly, so always use the private version. I do think this is a bug in Upcoming, but I also think that keeping public/private versions of your content as discrete resources provides more comprehensible privacy management.