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This is a sore spot for me. Ancestry.com is where I found my birth family about 5 years ago. My adoptive mother gave me a DNA test for Christmas, and the whole

This is a sore spot for me. Ancestry.com is where I found my birth family about 5 years ago. My adoptive mother gave me a DNA test for Christmas, and the whole family took them. Then, my father loaned me his credentials for his All-Access Ancestry.com account. Through that access, I was able to build a family tree for my birth family that goes back to the 17th century. Perhaps not entirely accurate in all those generations, but it's a start. Unfortunately, as soon as Ancestry mandated MFA for all accounts, I lost access to my father's. This was a good thing, because we weren't supposed to be sharing in the first place. But I also lost access to all those tools for research. To add insult to injury, there are no export tools for getting your data out of Ancestry. It's a roach motel. So the only hope I have is screenshotting or printing the most important stuff, and rebuilding it somewhere better. I don't know where to go at the moment. I certainly can't afford service at the level my father is paying for Ancestry.

Tao3300 3y ago
> as soon as Ancestry mandated MFA for all accounts, I lost access to my father's. This was a good thing, because we weren't supposed to be sharing in the first place. Don't let the smiling bastards gaslight you into thinking that's a good thing.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  No, social media accounts are really and truly personal things. Having my father's account meant that I could read all his DMs, I had access to all the trees and other relatives' DNA tests, and I could essentially impersonate him on the site. This made me really uncomfortable. If Dad really wanted to help out my research, then he could've picked up the tab for my own subscription on my own account, which I do have. It's not like Netflix where our recommendations would just be tossed in a blender. It's about trust and identity.
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    If someone is comfortable with that, I don't see the issue. I had a pair of grandparents who shared an email address, and IIRC we saw some customers who did that when I was working on banking systems a couple years ago. Actually I'm kind of tempted to set up a shared email for my wife and me for exactly things like that. She's already the main user of my Facebook account, where she goes on gardening groups or something.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      > If someone is comfortable with that, I don't see the issue. Perhaps the account operators are comfortable with that, but what about their contacts? Account sharing is explicitly against Terms of Service in certain cases. I know wives who run email accounts under their husband's name, and nobody's the wiser. I suppose that's alright for an intimate married couple. Once on a mud long ago, one of the players had a persona as an attractive young woman, and she was known as one of the most active and wittiest people in our social circle. Then upon reaching a crisis, "she" admitted that her character had been alternately controlled by a woman and her live-in boyfriend, handing off whenever they saw fit. So some of us felt a little shaken by the deception. Of course we all knew from the start, that many "female" characters in the MUD world were not so in real life. There was an MMOG I used to play where account sharing was forbidden, and quite bannable. I had worked many long hours on building a skill that would be useful to our whole group, and I let it be known that I would be available for anyone who wanted me to help out in that regard. Yet, the other leader maintained an alt character to sort of circumvent a game mechanic, and the idea is that we'd all share the credentials to log in to that alt account and use the character. I was livid, because that activity could've got them all banned by association, and also because they just didn't seem interested in the service I offered them. Oh well.
- tzs 3y ago
  It's funny. On the threads about the 23AndMe sorta data breach where 14000 users fell to credential stuffing 23AndMe was criticized for not requiring MFA.
FateOfNations 3y ago
It isn't entirely complete, but you can export trees from Ancestry as GED files, which is the closest one can get to an interoperable family tree file format.

Tao3300 3y ago

> as soon as Ancestry mandated MFA for all accounts, I lost access to my father's. This was a good thing, because we weren't supposed to be sharing in the first place. Don't let the smiling bastards gaslight you into thinking that's a good thing.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
No, social media accounts are really and truly personal things. Having my father's account meant that I could read all his DMs, I had access to all the trees and other relatives' DNA tests, and I could essentially impersonate him on the site. This made me really uncomfortable. If Dad really wanted to help out my research, then he could've picked up the tab for my own subscription on my own account, which I do have. It's not like Netflix where our recommendations would just be tossed in a blender. It's about trust and identity.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  If someone is comfortable with that, I don't see the issue. I had a pair of grandparents who shared an email address, and IIRC we saw some customers who did that when I was working on banking systems a couple years ago. Actually I'm kind of tempted to set up a shared email for my wife and me for exactly things like that. She's already the main user of my Facebook account, where she goes on gardening groups or something.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    > If someone is comfortable with that, I don't see the issue. Perhaps the account operators are comfortable with that, but what about their contacts? Account sharing is explicitly against Terms of Service in certain cases. I know wives who run email accounts under their husband's name, and nobody's the wiser. I suppose that's alright for an intimate married couple. Once on a mud long ago, one of the players had a persona as an attractive young woman, and she was known as one of the most active and wittiest people in our social circle. Then upon reaching a crisis, "she" admitted that her character had been alternately controlled by a woman and her live-in boyfriend, handing off whenever they saw fit. So some of us felt a little shaken by the deception. Of course we all knew from the start, that many "female" characters in the MUD world were not so in real life. There was an MMOG I used to play where account sharing was forbidden, and quite bannable. I had worked many long hours on building a skill that would be useful to our whole group, and I let it be known that I would be available for anyone who wanted me to help out in that regard. Yet, the other leader maintained an alt character to sort of circumvent a game mechanic, and the idea is that we'd all share the credentials to log in to that alt account and use the character. I was livid, because that activity could've got them all banned by association, and also because they just didn't seem interested in the service I offered them. Oh well.
tzs 3y ago
It's funny. On the threads about the 23AndMe sorta data breach where 14000 users fell to credential stuffing 23AndMe was criticized for not requiring MFA.

FateOfNations 3y ago

It isn't entirely complete, but you can export trees from Ancestry as GED files, which is the closest one can get to an interoperable family tree file format.