Ann L.

With meetup.com's new settings (currently set as of January 2017), your activities are public information to anyone with access to the internet. So if you are going on a hike with just a few people, or opening up your home for a meetup (e.g., for professional networking, hobbies or a children's playdate), the title of your event, date, time, and the number of people going are information available to anyone in the public searching on meetup.com, not just your members. If the title of a posted meetup event includes the location, then predators will know where to go and when--which is not good if you are a small group, or have kids, or will go into remote areas (e.g. For hiking), or will be in a private home (which is never a good idea with strangers in any case). If you omit the location from the title, predators can still see an easy target, request to join, and once joined, can find out the location of the meetup. Meetup.com is about meeting up with people, including those you don't know (for recreation, professional purposes, etc.) In the past, you can limit your risk by providing meetup information to just your members, but now you are exposed to an unlimited number of people on the internet. I've contacted Meetup Headquarters, and they refused to change the settings so that your event information can be kept private because they want others to know your group's activity so they can join if interested. In other words, they want more people to join meetup groups. The bigger the group, the more sponsors it might get (and therefore perhaps more money goes to Meetup). But sponsors BEWARE. Most members of a meetup group are INACTIVE--they don't even visit the group's website anymore. Here's how sponsors can verify this. Request to join membership of a meetup group. Once a member, click on "members" and click on "last visited". You will then see the members who have visited the website in the last couple days, weeks, months, or year. The bigger the group, the more INACTIVE members there are. Therefore know that the number of membership is meaningless before you pour money or freebies into the group. As for security, Facebook Group is a better alternative since you can keep your group information private with them so far, and it's also free (unlike Meetup, which charges organizers). I'm moving my group to Facebook Group, and hope others heed my warning about meetup.com. Check out horror stories about Craigslist.com to know the types of crimes that can happen. I've written to Meetup Headquarters about this danger, and they refuse to allow people to keep meetup information completely private. Having been put on notice about the dangers means that's negligence, or recklessness, for which they can be sued if something should happen. PLEASE don't use meetup.com for children's events, or to go into remote areas, or to go into a private home for an event.