Privacy is more complicated today than when this web site started, and while we all want this to have an informal and friendly feel to it, some precautions are in order.
Your data are not given away to outside parties, ever. They're held in absolute confidence, with the grade of security you get on a commercial server. When you visit, you are never tracked, profiled or any of that criminal nonsense that social media companies get away with nowadays. There are instructions to search engines that they should not index the directory; but they may not comply.
So your nickname, full name, year of graduation, city and e-mail contact are potentially available to potential employers, business competitors, legit detectives, spear-phishers and personality thieves. For that reason, you and nobody else should decide what information appears here.
It is acceptable for schoolmates to search for others of their era, their city, etc, within reason, and to contact them.
The policy is that you are not to be contacted for any commercial purpose. An obvious risk is that not everyone will observe that policy.
In a friendly, information system, Joe would fill out information on Jack, to build out their social circle. That's now discouraged, particularly for younger mid-career chaps who could have their lives turned upside-down by malicious data leaks.
contact details for the purpose of being reached one-on-one by their friends, not via mass mailings, and certainly not to receive commercial publicity of any sort. We will publish details of any commercially motivated attempt to reach alumni en masse in violation of this policy.It is technically possible to mine the directory for names and e-mail addresses, manually or semi-automatically. It is acceptable for you to do so to obtain your class list or details of alumni known to you, or even one or two persons with whom you share a common interest (e.g. live in Swaziland). It is not acceptable for you to mine the list to obtain details on multiple alumni not personally known to you.
If you can identify yourself as an SMS alumnus, for example by citing SMS landmarks not found on the web, you may request details (e.g. phone number, full mailing address) on an individual or a class, on the understanding that you will contact persons known to you, individually.
The Editor may at his discretion use the mailing list for urgent/important SMS-related matters. This privilege is used sparingly, e.g. about every 3-5 years.