Ancestry dot com and living people

[curriouscat]

I have discovered that Ancestry routinely displays living people in their public trees. Ancestry&#39s claim is that &#39you cannot search for living people&#39. And that is correct. However, if you search for the living person&#39s deceased grand-parent, you can then follow the tree down to the living people.

I think that this is probably a breach of Australia&#39s privacy laws.

To avoid this, if you intend to upload a GEDCOM file to Ancestry, you should either make certain to uncheck the &#39include living people&#39 box, or leave it checked and check &#39depersonalized&#39 and choose one of the depersonalization options. &#39Gender Only&#39 sounds good.

I am very glad that iFamily offers these options. Display of name, birth place, birth date and mother&#39s maiden name is a significant privacy issue in today&#39s times of identity theft. Don&#39t offer these juicy pieces of info to people who might trawl your tree. Ancestry does a very poor job at this protection. Use the tools built into iFamily to protect the identity of people in your tree.

PS. Genes Reunited has similar problems.

[Terry Levett]

I would suggest you don&#39t make your trees public then the problem doe&#39s not occur, doing this filters out most of those people who are too lazy to do their own research and just want to collect names without checking proper resources, having a private tree has the advantage that it make serious researchers contact you and gives you the chance to exchange data, this is not foolproof of course I have still had many s..ts take data and give zilch in return which makes me vary wary, so I give nothing to people who don&#39t give their name or any info first. On the other hand I will give genuine researchers all I have, RECIPROCITY is the name of the game.
Ancestry promote the Public tree as a form of source material but in my experience 90% of public trees are incorrect and I refuse to attach them to my tree&#39s (25 at the last count) as sources, this is Ancestry&#39s way of getting new customer&#39s which is their reason d&#39 etre these days.
Sorry if this has gone a bit "off track" but I think it is strongly connected to your posting.
Terry Levett (France)

[Geordielass]

I agree wholeheartedly with you Terry - I used to have a public tree on Ancestry and found that some incorrect data from my tree ended up spread across about a dozen others - fortunately for my tree I found my error and corrected it and at the same changed the status to private!

Whenever I export data whether in GEDCOM; HTML or PDF I always depersonalise, especially for my webpages (which are also password protected) as I found that searching through google for names that are in my tree on the internet will give me pages on my home tree as hits!

My advice to anyone sharing a tree or any other data is to make sure that you keep your personal details private