[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki, wishes to become a wiki project

Sat Apr 1 13:28:03 UTC 2006

Benjamin Webb wrote:

>What about if you wanted to have yourself on a family tree could you do
>that? (See my prewious comment)
>
>On 31/03/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Simply asking a person's permission would simply lead to chaos.  The
>>>person whom you ask may agree, but his brother may not.  A 110 year rule
>>>may be a little excessive.  The US census, for example, is in the public
>>>domain after 72 years.  BMD announcements in newspapers are all a matter
>>>of public record; telephone directories, property tax records and the
>>>Social Security Death Index are all publicly available sources of
>>>information.
>>>
>>>Ec
>>>
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>The point of the 110 rule is that it does fit with almost all known
>>privacy laws throughout the world, and for geneological research
>>purposes is generally not that big of an inconvience. 
>>
Yourself, perhaps.  I understand in part that you want to show a full 
family tree starting with yourself and going to your ancestors (or 
decendants if you are older).  The problem here is that this information 
is all going to be publicly available for anybody to use and have 
access.  Indeed, a very, very common "security question" used to help 
prevent identity theft is to ask what your mother's maiden name was.  By 
publishing full geneological links in a public place like on a Wikimedia 
project, you are inviting fraud, identity theft, and violation of 
several personal privacy laws.  With the Wikimedia Foundation so 
paranoid about something so insignificant as an IP address connected to 
a user account and the hyper paranoid (in my opinion) check user policy, 
this might be enough to kill this whole proposal completely in terms of 
violating privacy laws.

More important, the suggestion here is that other living relatives may 
also be listed if a policy like this isn't implemented.  They did not 
give concent to have their information posted in a public forum, even if 
on a technical level the information is available through public records 
like birth certificates and driver's license registrations.

I completely agree that this is a sticky issue.  I'm just suggesting 
that some thought needs to go into it and I'm also suggesting what other 
groups are doing who publish geneological information in a public forum.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning