Hi Robrobbie -- when you first join the online network all of your profile information is set to private. The reason for that is that the online network is public, and we didn't want anyone to accidentally reveal personal information or parts of their story they'd prefer to keep private. The idea is that you can choose whatever setting suits you best by clicking on the privacy icon to the right of each field in your profile and changing it to what you prefer. There's a bit more information about that in a 'tips' post, here: http://www.bcna.org.au/network/groups/54/blog/4433.
If you want to read a bit more about the network in general and how it works, you can download a user guide from the Help page, or you can visit the Q&A page or the Getting Started group.
Let me know if that doesn't make sense, please keep asking if you have questions.
~Di