Yeah, come to think of it, since about the only thing you have to fill in (let alone fill in accurately, or precisely enough to potentially invade privacy even if you do fill it in) is your username, which will show up on your posts anyway: what’s being concealed by making a profile private is basically the posting history.
Which can probably be hunted out by anybody determined enough by sufficient searching on the poster’s username. And it seems to me that the entire purpose of forbidding socks is to prevent hiding the posting history. So why are people allowed to make it difficult to find theirs by making their profiles private?
– I suppose the other thing that may be hidden is how much the poster was lurking without posting; but that’s given so vaguely in the profiles, and amounts to so little information, that I don’t see much sense in hiding that either.