Those users likewise no longer see themselves listed as possible family members or known associates of family who do still have profiles on the site. 12, users who had opted out confirmed that they no longer see their records when they search the site. The first big warning worked its way around the world during the day on Jan. The site requests up to 48 hours to scrub living-person records from the site after an opt-out has been requested. Just wait a few minutes, refresh, and try again. Every time a warning about the site hits a new node of high popularity, it ends up getting a lot of opt-out requests at once. 10, Brittain’s tweets have since traveled far and wide, leaping off the service and making the rounds on Facebook and Tumblr as well. The site may occasionally be slammed with traffic since Jan. If you, too, want your “living people” data to be made unavailable from the FamilyTreeNow database, you can visit their privacy policy and then follow the directions on the opt-out page to make your data disappear. Here’s the good part: opting out appears to work… at least, more or less. Whether your records are eerily accurate or bizarrely wrong appears to be hit-and-miss across users. Yours truly, for example, has never had family in Alabama - but some deep-south connections were suggested, by virtue of sharing names, birth months, and birth years. Users with common names, for example, may find their data chaotically intertwined with other, similarly-named folks of about the same age. Others found that the accuracy of the records is… mixed. Various users report finding all of their full addresses going back to childhood, their siblings’ addresses, and information for their ex-spouses and former partners. Users have expressed shock and dismay at finding incredible volumes of their personal data available for the asking on FamilyTreeNow.įor many folks, the list of possible known relatives and associates is indeed filled entirely with family members and former roommates. The site claims to have access to “billions of historical records, including census (1790-1940) records, birth records, death records, marriage & divorce records, living people records, and military records.” That’s pretty par for the course for any genealogy site, with one glaring exception: the “living people” records. Using only a first name, last name, and state, millions of users - including most of team Consumerist - have been able to look themselves up and find a significant volume of data available on demand and available to anyone. The furor this week started when Twitter user and writer Anna Brittain sent out a lengthy thread of tweets imploring everyone to immediately go to the site, search for their name, view the data, and then opt-out. While this has caused a minor uproar, with concerned folks telling each other how to opt out of having their data shared by this site, this sort of data-aggregating service isn’t exactly anything new - and while what this site is doing might seem remarkably creepy, it is, in fact, completely legal. This week, the social media world has been alight with warning about a “genealogy” site that makes just about anyone’s information - addresses (current and former), age, family members, possible associates - available for free to any user.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |