PSA: I got banned from a genealogy forum for posting my family tree wrong for 8 years

I was on a site called Geni.com sharing my family history and thought I was doing it right. Then a moderator in Ohio pointed out I was adding living people without their permission, which broke their privacy rules. It never crossed my mind that putting my cousin's full name and birth year online could be a problem. Has anyone else run into privacy rules they didn't know about on these history sites?

2 comments

2 Comments

olivers2822d ago

Wait, is that even a real rule on Geni? I've seen people post their whole family trees with living people tagged on Ancestry and nobody bats an eye. The Ohio moderator thing sounds specific to that site though. Maybe smaller forums have stricter rules because they're worried about lawsuits. I'd bet the cousin you listed didn't even care but the mods are just covering their butts. Privacy stuff is getting way more complicated. People used to put everything online but now everyone's scared about identity theft and data scraping bots.

patricia_wells21d ago

The Ohio moderator thing does sound pretty extra. My grandma is on Facebook with her full name and birth year and nobody's filed a lawsuit yet.