The discussion revolves around disabling “sensitive” columns in the User Directory. deeplow initially requests a global setting to prevent users from viewing certain columns, such as “Topics Viewed”, “Posts Read”, and “Days Visited”, due to privacy concerns. markvanlan explains that the existing feature allows administrators to disable these columns globally, which deeplow then confirms. deeplow suggests updating the feature’s description to clarify that it’s a global setting, not a user configuration. Additionally, deeplow notes that these fields should also be removable from user public profiles. pfaffman advises that while the fields can be hidden from profiles, removing them entirely would require a plugin.
Continuing the discussion from New Leaderboard/User Directory Features 
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Now that we have this feature, it would be nice if there were a setting to prevent users from viewing certain columns. For example, the “Topics Viewed”, “Posts Read” and “Days Visited” are quite privacy invasive since they’re not things that are public.
That’s exactly what the feature allows. You can disable those columns, and they won’t show up in the table.
Ah! I thought this was something each user could configure. Thanks. Will test it now.
Epic! This is exactly what I needed. Maybe the description could be changed to explain this is not a user configuration, but rather a global setting.
Thanks a lot for implementing this @markvanlan!
(p.s. moved it to support)
Now the only thing missing is to also be able to remove these sensitive fields from the user’s public profile. Will look into this.
You can easily hide them from the profile, but the data will be available for someone who knows how to look. Removing it from the serializer would require a plugin.
I guess that makes sense. Thanks for the insight.