Geni family trees been published on personal websites

I do not think it is ethical if anyone takes my family tree information and publishes it on their own website. Permission does need to be asked as certain people do not want their information made public. I am talking about the living of course. I have had to answer to family members and this has been very embarrising for me. I am sure I spelt that incorrectly. That is also why I took a break from Geni.

Thanks to all
Debbie

Post deleted by Private User on Jan 11, 2011 at 9:29 AM

Post deleted by Private User on Jan 11, 2011 at 9:30 AM

In some countries, it may be illegal. You should have the authority to ask for its removal. That is.. if your personal information is being published online without your permission.

Yes, just ask which part of the tree can be published.

I don't know about Canada, but in the USA aren't Birth-Marriage-Death records a matter of public record? I've seen plenty of county courts that have these documents online...

There is no "copyright" on this information, only on the form of presentation.

Shmuel - that might be the case, but it's not appropriate. Geni should not allow this unless the user is an admin of that profile.

Privacy terms are here:

http://www.geni.com/company/privacy

In a case where someone else has published your details, remember they did it, not Geni. Who knows where they got the info -- public records, credit check, someone's GEDCOM.

The point is -- YOU can "claim" your profile information, make it private, delete it, etc. and geni will assist you.

First step is to open a HELP desk case -- help@geni.com or link at the bottom of every page. Please do.

Have you contacted the manager and asked to claim your name? That you should do as well.

Beth,

I don't think there is a technical way for geni to prevent someone from making a profile of someone living?

In the case of my own more extended living family, how I handled it was by putting in "Living (last name) and approx birthdate (if known). And of course that info is private and non viewable.

As my cousins etc come onto geni I send them email invites to take ownership of their "shell" profiles. It's all up to them from there. Actually I'm going to make sure I transfer mgmt of their direct parents & grandparents as well.

May I ask why you think the tree came from Geni? Ancestry.com seems to be the site that allows anyone to get info about anyone as long as their paid up.
Just wondering.

To prevent leaking of your data - write everything in Display Name field - it's currently not included in GEDCOM exports :DD

The people who publish the family tree information on their own website, are they in your family group (4th cousins and closer)? If not, they don't have access to anything that isn't already public on Geni.

GEDCOM exports from Geni are not very flexible - downloading a forest will give you no choice - 100000 profiles (20-40MB unzipped) and splitting that into different branches would be quite time consuming.

Private profiles are included in the export, first names are initials only but middle names are spelt out fully. For example, this is the amount of data that would be included about yourself:
1 NAME D Alice /Potgieter/
2 GIVN D Alice
2 SURN Potgieter
2 _MAR Ross-Brooks
1 SEX F
1 RESI
2 PLAC Calgary, Alberta, Canada
2 ADDR
3 CITY Calgary
3 STAE Alberta
3 CTRY Canada
3 NOTE {geni:location_name} current_residence
plus links to your immediate family members
Display Names of people who are listed as Added by (not Managed by) are included:
0 @S9@ SUBM
1 NAME Deborah Alice Potgieter
1 ADDR
2 CITY Calgary
2 STAE Alberta
2 CTRY Canada
2 NOTE {geni:location_name} current_residence

GEDCOM forest export of your third great grandfather has 1644 people who were the first to create a profile (not including co-managers of merged profiles). Would you contact them one by one if you were to create a website of your own?

@Private User
Anly good software will split the trees anyway you want it automaticly.
Thats not the issue. The info you just provived above is automaticly indexed by search engines and other profile selling companies.
I'm sure Debora would like you to delete the above post before it's picked up and catalogued.

Well, in the end Geni will be one of those "profile selling" companies. All this mad rush to get a big tree will give them an unbelievable data base - which will be worth $. That's when Geni users can see the fees go up. But, I digress :)

The info I provided above?
Name, gender and city of residence - highly confidential and never published before!
In most cases the tree would need to be split offline before re-using it online due to the file size. Even after that there may be hundreds of people to contact for permission.

I do not have a problem with my profile been published, but I struggled to get family members to join , I then convinced them that their profiles will remain private. A few of them saw their profiles on a public website, and they were up in arms. That was the issue.

I know the information came from Geni as I know who put it on their own website and they could only have got if from Geni. (That is in reply to Marvin)

Well, it depends what is their understanding of private.
If their name is spelt out in their profile then anybody who is logged in to Geni can search for it and by default claimed user profiles show up in Google unless they have changed their privacy settings in http://www.geni.com/account_settings/permissions (Let the public search for me).

Yeah, I think things have really changed on geni since i have been offline for almost a year. I will re-check all my privacy settings.