Privacy Issues in Genealogy
Below are genealogy and family history news stories related to privacy issues. Click on the links for the full articles.
Facebook Announces Tighter Privacy Standards - Facebook announced this week that they were going to implement tighter privacy standards. The announcement came after a year in which Facebook was heavily criticized on multiple fronts for its weak privacy settings. We were part of that criticism as the first genealogy website to warn people in the spring of this year that there were serious privacy concerns with popular genealogy applications on Facebook like We’re Related...{Click here to read the full article}
Regulator Finds Facebook has Serious Privacy Gaps - The world’s largest social networking site has been taken to task over its “serious privacy gaps”. Facebook has become the focus of an investigation by Canada’s Privacy Commissioner. The results of this investigation are likely to have significant implications for genealogy even for those genealogists who do not use Facebook...[More]
Europe Demands Privacy Standards for Social Networking Sites - European privacy regulators issued an opinion this week on how European privacy laws should apply to social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. This comes a week after regulators expressed privacy concerns over the popular genealogy application We’re Related on Facebook. European privacy laws tend to be much more expansive than other parts of the world, including the United States. As a result, European privacy regulators are in many cases setting the standards for privacy on the internet...[More]
Privacy Fears Raised Over Genealogy Application on Facebook - A genealogy application on Facebook has drawn regulatory scrutiny. Facebook, the largest social network in the world, has a popular genealogy application called We’re Related that allows people on Facebook to link to other family members who are also on Facebook. Now, European privacy regulators say We’re Related may be violating people’s privacy because it demands too much personal data...[More]
Germany Bans Genetic Genealogy Tests - Germany has passed a law that bans all direct-to-consumer genetic tests. Although the new law does not appear to be directly written to ban at-home genetic genealogy tests, one consequence of the law is that people in Germany will no longer be able to order genetic genealogy tests online...[More]
Who Owns Your Online Genealogy Information? - A significant number of genealogists store personal genealogy information online. This raises an interesting question: Who owns the information you post online?...[More]
Does the US Census Undercount? - As the US gears up for the next census in 2010, questions continue to linger over the accuracy of the last census conducted in 2000...[more]
How Accurate are Genetic Ancestry Tests? - Genetic ancestry tests have become popular with genealogists wanting to know where their ancestors lived...[more]
California Licensing Genetic Testing - California has become the first jurisdiction in the world to require companies to be formally licensed before they can offer genetic testing directly to consumers...[more]
UK Considers Scrapping the Census - Throughout the ages and across all nations, one universal truth about a government census becomes evident: they are difficult, time-consuming and expensive to do...[more]
