I judge from these replies that wikitree policy is that living person profiles must be some form of "Private" level; I was completely unaware of this (although all profiles for living people that I manage should be private or unlisted). That is really hard to find in the wikitree help (and I read the help pages quite a bit) - we should probably fix that. I'm fine with it being the rule - I certainly understand that hardcoding the system to protect living people is going to be best in 99.9% of the cases and worth the loss in rare cases like this - but we need to make it an easy to see rule.
The Honor Code simply says "We respect privacy. We privacy-protect anything we think our family members might not want public. If that's not enough for someone, we delete their personal information." That defined my approach to the matter, but does not put a hard rule that living people cannot have a Public profile.
The Privacy page states "Private is the default setting for profiles of living people." but there's nothing about requirements for living people. Contrast this with what we say about people born 200 years ago on that same page: "Profiles of people over 200 years old must be Open." This page probably should have a statement that the profiles of living people cannot be Open or Public. I'd recommend a statement in both the Open and the Public section that states "Profiles of living people cannot be Open/Public".
The only place I found reference to it is somewhat sideways reference in the Living People page: "Any profile, unless it's for a person over 200 years old, can be made private by the manager. And any profile, unless the WikiTree system knows it's for a living person, can be made public by the manager." It would probably be good to put a clarifying statement in this paragraph as well that "profiles of living people should never be set to Open or Public".
