Privacy Changes on Geni

I fixed mine. I don't like being a gender less blob (not that there's anything wrong with it).

Hey. Where'd you get that "Photo Requested" photo? ;)

Or a "friendly face" text photo? ;-)

Yes i can see you now Harald, Erica is playing hard to get though.
I believe i have my own settings correct now :)

Think what happened -- Folks who left 'show profile photo' on the default, which was to show photo, stopped showing -- those who had at one time changed/actually set to show continued to show.

Mike Stangel --

Another BUG -- not sure how widespread -- back before MyHeritage bought Geni, a third cousin added her daughter's husband as Public -- he now shows as if Private (since living), and in edit, ball is in position for Private -- BUT - He appears in my lists for Family Group w/privacy status Public. No idea if single oddity, or symptomatic of general problem.

Lois:
1. "show profile photo" to public was default true, but being ignored for logged-in users. With over 8 million Geni users and no barrier to create an account, there's no practical difference between "logged out" and "some user you've never hear of". So, in this release we went back to honoring that setting for anyone outside your Family Group.

2. can you send me a link to the third cousin's son-in-law ?

Private User the logged-out profile for James Tregear should be fixed now (public once again).

Mike - I PM'd you the link.

I replied to Lois' PM but for anyone else seeing something similar: it looks like we have about a million living profiles that were public before we made all living profiles private, back in December of 2012. These are the profiles that look private but show up in lists when you set the "privacy status" filter to public. We'll be fixing those lists in the next day or two.

Dear Cousin Judith: I just got back from Texas and an old friend who has a genealogy account put together a sheath of records, including my dad Myron McKee's mother Lora Beaulah (Bea) Lucas McKee. I never knew many of the Lucas' except a brother Uncle Dan, a a few cousins. But I was thrilled to get the names of a great-grandfather and -mother going back some generations. There were evidently some Native American grandmothers in her line.

Also, my mother's mother's family, who I never knew much about at all.
I just don't have the head for this, my sister Marilyn does though, and I keep her filled in. (My granddaughter just married, so I have to add her husband to the family records.

I really don't have too many privacy issues for myself but can't speak for the others. I'm fascinated about knowing what my roots are. Glad you're there to get the history, and thanks for your efforts.

Michael, they could have been working on this for a long time, and rollout bugs are normal on any site. You probably notice more here simply because you use the site so much. Also, bear in mind that we have a massive community of users and we're only on page two of this thread, with the bugs identified so far either already having been fixed or begun being fixed. Let's keep things constructive.

Additional suffixes should probably be discussed in another thread. Would you like to start one?

Judi, I haven't seen anyone else mention problems with finding living people. Can you elaborate, maybe with an example of what you did? I'm curious to see in case this comes up for others.

Thanks Jane DuBovy Its been alot of hard Work and a lot of unselfish sharing on family members, it been great finding you, your sister Marilyn and brother John; and also some other distant McKee cousin by keeping as many profiles public the rewards have been FABULOUS and GREAT and keep growing slowly as the years roll by here on GENI

To me the KEY is SHARING and though sites like this, My Heritage, Ancestry.com and familysearch.org and a way to preserve what has been handed down to me through the years since 1976...

Thanks Mike, the logged-off profiles look good, but where is the birth date? I can't recall if it was ever present.

Judith "Judi" Elaine (McKee) Burns a GEDCOM you download should have the same names that you see on the web site. If not, that's a bug. I'll ask one of our engineers to test this.

Judi and Private if you've found a private profile you can click Contact Manager, no? I'm not sure what use case you're describing here, that is made harder with the new privacy rules.

Private User good catch, we'll fix the missing birth date (and check to make sure birth location is there, too)

I have started seeing messages under revisions on my home page that private has modified the profiles of some of my deceased family members. Are these messages being generated by this privacy change? Or is it something weirder? I can['t see that anything substantive has been changed.

Judith "Judi" Elaine (McKee) Burns, I can appreciate the uselessness of an entire branch of <private> Lastname profiles, but it's made more complicated by the fact that there may be profiles you can see intermingled with them. In these cases you probably would like the GEDCOM to contain enough information to discern how those profiles relate to yourself or other profiles in the tree.

Susan Graber, if the revision is attributed to Geni (identified by the user thumbnail to the left looking like this: http://geni3-mhcache-com-myheritage.netdna-ssl.com/images/system_us... ) and it says "[name]'s profile was updated. private" then yes, this is the result of the new privacy rules.

You can switch them back if you desire, and the system will not switch them again.

You can prevent existing private deceased profiles from being switched by doing it yourself -- make it public and then private again, and the system will pass it over as a profile on which a user has explicitly changed the privacy.

http://geni3-mhcache-com-myheritage.netdna-ssl.com/images/system_us
This link is giving a Page Not Found return

Thanks, Mike Stangel Is there a way for an unidentified person to modify profiles I have entered that are now public? Or since all geni members are non-private, will they be identified if they modify a profile?

This message just popped up on my Google Chrome
https://plus.google.com/photos/104868302441624038496/albums/6032271...

Susan Graber public profiles in the big tree are generally editable by other users, unless a curator marks them a Master Profile and chooses to lock it (fully or just certain fields). All edits will appear on the profile's revision tab and can be undone using our revision history dialog (the "view" link at the end of the revision story). Our Customer Service team can also deal with users who vandalize public profiles.

Angus Wood-Salomon I can't see the screen shot -- what does it say?

Mike Stangel sent by email

I have noticed - no notice goes out when Geni changes the Privacy Status from Private to Public thru this process. I am hoping when it is finished there will be an announcement in Recent Activity, letting folks know the changes have been completed, and suggesting if it matters to them that they check Lists for those now Public -- or Private and Deceased (whichever, if either, would bother them).

Also notice - no notice goes up on Recent Activity if I change the Privacy Status thru using Lists and clicking "Make this Profile P...."

However, if I go in to the profile and click edit and then change Privacy Status, a Recent Activity message is generated.

Mike Stangel will the deceased profiles you change and make public have a green dot next to the name?

Howard Eichenwald Yes, and a revision attributed to Geni saying the profile was updated - private. when you hold your mouse over the word private it'll pop up a little tooltip saying "false" -- meaning we edited the field named private to set its value to false. (a bit confusing; it makes more sense when the field is something like "first name")

Private User I believe there should be a news feed story about it. Do you have an example of a profile where that didn't happen?

Mike - sent you a PM, with link to one of them.

Most of tree was marked private. I am finding that has been changed with out my input or permission. How do I change all of them back with out having to do it one at a time. My preference has long been marked in my preferences.

Click "Family" at top (between "Tree" and "Research" - then choose Lists - or use this link: http://www.geni.com/list
click "show advanced ..." (if not already showing) - then click on "Filters" and click arrow next to "Any privacy status" -- click "Public" - then click "Update List" -- this will give a list of all the Public Profiles in your "Family Tree" -- each with a line in right hand column saying "Make This Profile Private" - go down, clicking that for each one [after clicked, it will change to "Make This Profile Public"] - in a sense this is still one at a time -- but much faster than going in to each Profile and clicking edit, etc. [and not as complicated as it probably seems, reading the description]

You can also do again, if worried you missed some, changing "Family Tree" to Managed By, and again to "Added By" -- but so far, all of my Public ones have been in "Family Tree" - probably cause if outside my family tree, it defaulted to Public, and I had changed it to Private -- any that were Private due to an active change are supposed to be untouched.

Read the first post in this discussion -- which was also announcement linked to at top of your Home Page. I do give Geni credit for telling us about this change a week before they started to implement it. In my case - sigh - that was the week I was away camping with only one day on which I managed to sneak some internet access. But they did tell us it was coming. Unless you clicked the little "x", it is probably basically still there on your Home Page. And this discussion has been coded to stay at top of "Public Discussions" from when started thru now. So again - I give Geni kudos for both those actions, and for letting us switch them back. Also to Mike for explicitly spelling out (tho not till July 4th - before then, it was said, but not quite as clearly) how to avoid the profiles being changed to Public -- last paragraph here: http://www.geni.com/discussions/136757?msg=951028 and go thru proactively.

Believe their program is still churning thru, slowly turning more and more Profiles Public -- so unless you are sure all of yours have been Public and then turned back to Private, keep checking Lists until they announce "all done" - possibly here.

I hope this fixes the problem I have with one place where I am attempting a merge, the siblings and parents of someone born in 1890 are all NOT marked as deceased and do NOT contain a birthday. Now I am waiting for the profile owner to reply, but they must have their e-mail turned off, since I have not heard back in a while. It turns out to be a nice tree of Zombies. Not sure if when entering the tree originally they marked everything as private. I'll just be patient and wait.