DEVON-L Archives

Archiver > DEVON > 2009-11 > 1258667466


From: "Adrian B" <>
Subject: Re: [DEV] Data Privaxy
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:51:06 -0000
References: <21946F66A2814B5CB1F5F9071AD0A3CE@Beaufort>
In-Reply-To: <21946F66A2814B5CB1F5F9071AD0A3CE@Beaufort>


Some thoughts:
1. GenesReunited has some facilities that are supposed to obscure living
people - trouble was it was assuming people were living because they were
born within the last X years and I had no death details for them. But this
simply meant I had no death details for them, not that they were still
living.

I mention this not because you might be about to use GR but to draw
attention to the situations that other sites might land you in if you take
any advantage of auto-privacy options on their behalf. And this isn't really
a criticism of GR etc either - they have to write a site that copes with
anyone and if it was me writing the software, I'd assume anyone born 120y
ago might still be alive.

But the point is that you can tweak and obscure stuff how you like, so if
it's not too much trouble, I'd do all the privacy stuff yourself and not
hide stuff that shouldn't be hidden.

2. I'm assuming from your suggestion that your grandparents are all dead. In
order to obscure stuff for privacy reasons, firstly NO names for any of
their descendants - remember the security question about "What is your
mother's maiden name?" The only safe way round that risk is not to put any
names, no M or F, no ages, etc. If you really want to put something in, put
"LIVING surname" as their name where "surname" is the appropriate name, on
the basis that it's fairly clear that the children of Mr and Mrs Jones will
start out life as Jones. And if, for various reasons such as non-marriage,
they don't - change it so they do - it might get too obvious otherwise.

3. Of course, the thing is - why put any descendants of your grandparents on
the site? It might be necessary to put you and your parents on (as "LIVING
surname" entries) in order to connect the trees up but why anyone else? Your
relatives presumably know their way enough round their own relatives to know
their own grandparents, who might be yours or siblings to yours, so why give
any names below that level?

4. And finally - if you aren't confident - just DON'T put it on a publically
visible site. I promise you that you'll have more fun writing up a story for
distribution on paper than feeding a GEDCOM into a site. Of course, you
might want stuff to be visible, not least to catch the relatives you didn't
know about, so you might want to go for a site.

I haven't got definite solutions for you - I just want to make you think
about some options.

Adrian B


-----Original Message-----
From: [mailto:] On
Behalf Of Ruth Bartlett
Sent: Thu 19 November 2009 20:27
To:
Subject: [DEV] Data Privaxy

What is the best way of protecting the privacy of the living while compiling
a family tree for inclusion on one of the many ancestry sites - how do
others handle it?

I had this question from a cousin and don't know how to answer



whether I should record all Living Descendants of my grandparents

with name only and an M for male or F for female, excluding all vital and
confidential information such as births, and marriages, and writing the word
Living or and Private, before each living descendent. What do you think? I
am very concerned about identity theft

I have numerous cousins, but about half a dozen or less who are
familycontributors to the Gill Tree.

Help & advice welcome, T.I.A. Ruth

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