To sign up for an account at Snowboard-Mag.com it requires someone to enter a Zip/Postal code. What is the purpose of doing this? Is it for the purposes of the website staff, or so users can find each other?

The reason I ask is because when you view profiles, it shows the code publically. This means anyone can find out other users' code. Combined with the city of location and the person's surname, this sort of information can be used to track down someone's street address and their telephone number, using yellow pages, even if those things are not listed in the person's profile.

This is really dangerous, even if you don't meet unsavoury characters on this website, with use of google, people who use the same alias here as on other sites, or even their name, can be followed to this site (which shows up high on results due to its large amount of popularity) and the data can be found that way.

This is a risk for all users, especially considering that (I think) minors can sign up for this site.

I think it should be made clear to people during the registration process that their code will be viewable. I think if people knew this, they might not want that. In the interest of people not submitting fake codes, a clickable box option called 'hide zip code' would I think be an excellent privacy option if you could somehow instate it. I'm not sure how difficult that would be. Having the code only viewable to staff for purposes of knwoing the general location of readers is a lot safer than being able to directly match up zip & postal codes with the users themselves, so it is not a risk to their safety from people who want to hurt or harass them.