4 ms·

Ask HN: Is your information on genealogy sites? How do you remove it?

• mindcrime 11y ago
  You could do a whois on the domain name and find some contact info there. ex: Registry Registrant ID: Registrant Name: Z-Corp Registrant Organization: Z-Corp Registrant Street: 1371 West 1250 South Registrant City: Orem Registrant State/Province: UT Registrant Postal Code: 84058 Registrant Country: US Registrant Phone: +1.8014910335
  • burger_moon 11y ago
    I did and found the CEO and his email address and an article written about him on mormonentrepreneur.net and an old home address and some more information. Z-Corp is just a shell that owns a handful of genealogy websites. I suppose emailing him directly is one option now, but what do people do that don't know how to sleuth on the internet take care of this?
    • SiVal 11y ago
      The LDS Church takes a very dim view of publishing genealogical information about living people. It is forbidden by church policy on any church-related site, many potential customers of a genealogy site are Mormon, and most of them know this policy, support it, and would take a VERY dim view of a website that intentionally violated it. I once consulted on an online genealogy system for the LDS Church, and being able to prevent this sort of privacy invasion was explicitly part of the spec as part of longtime, standing policy. As I very vaguely recall, the spec required a death date in the data for anything other than `(Living Person)` to be displayed (even the name was blocked), and in the absence of a death date, the data would not be displayed unless the birth date was more than a century earlier (which I think was later extended to more than a century, but I'm not sure.) Unfortunately, the site you mention has no connection to the church, but if the CEO was interviewed on a site called "mormonentrepreneur.net", he might in fact be very receptive to an email that simply claimed that someone had posted personal genealogical information about living people, you and your family, on his site, that you are "sure his policies (like other legitimate genealogy websites) would not allow this", and you would like it removed. You should at least start that way for the reasons I mentioned and for the fact that, like Reddit, these businesses mostly host huge piles of data contributed by non-staff members, and it is often too much data for their few staff members to have any hope of proactively moderating. You might need to be a squeaky wheel just because of the logistics. I hope that just pointing out that these are indisputably living people will be enough, but it's possible they will require some proof of your identity, because these sites are the targets of lots of data disputes between family members who try to modify each other's data as well as plain ol' vandalism.
      • burger_moon 11y ago
        Thank you very much for the response. I will look up some more info on the LDS thing so I can bring that up in the email and hopefully use that to persuade my information be taken down. I was not aware of these rules the LDS had for genealogy sites.
• brudgers 11y ago
  For a person in the US, there is a good chance that the information was gleaned from public records such as vital statistics. If that is the case then it is available to someone else to publish even if one site takes it down. In addition, sites are under no obligation to take down information contained in public records. Good luck.
  • burger_moon 11y ago
    Thank you. I did notice on ancestry.com they mention that some information is pulled from public records. I wouldn't be surprised if that is also abused by these sites as excuses to keep information up, but I will still attempt to get it taken down at least.
    • brudgers 11y ago
      Publishing public records isn't abuse. If a website takes such information down at an individual's request, it's a courtesy not an obligation.