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

Sat Apr 1 18:15:23 UTC 2006

On 01/04/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
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I understand the need for being cautious about security and I think that
your comment that the subject is something that needs to be thought hard
about is exactly right. However, there's one thing that I have been
wondering about. You have raised the point that identity theft could be
carried out, using the mother's maiden name. As, Rodovid grows and the
number of people with the same increases, it will be difficult to link a
person whose identity you are trying to steal with someone on the database.
To do this would mean having other data such as age, place of birth and so
on, which would probably be as difficult to obtain as  the maiden name.