Search indexing respects visibility; private excluded from results

A private profile that appears in site search or Google results is not private — it is merely hard to navigate to directly. Search engine indexing of private content breaches GDPR Art. 25's privacy-by-default requirement and CWE-200 (information exposure). Users who set their profiles to private expect complete exclusion from discovery, not just a locked profile page. Third-party search indices (Elasticsearch, Algolia) that ingest all records regardless of visibility are a particularly common oversight because indexing pipelines are often built before access control is finalized.

Filter visibility at the search query layer, not post-query. For Elasticsearch, apply a bool.filter clause; for Algolia, use optionalFilters or facetFilters. Emit noindex metadata for private profiles in your page generation.

Next.js generateMetadata example in src/app/u/[username]/page.tsx:

export async function generateMetadata({ params }) {
  const user = await db.user.findUnique({ where: { slug: params.username } });
  if (user?.profile_visibility !== 'public') {
    return { robots: { index: false, follow: false } };
  }
  return { robots: { index: true, follow: true } };
}

For Elasticsearch, wrap searches with a visibility filter so private records are never returned regardless of requester — do not rely on post-query filtering, which can still expose counts and aggregations.