Familypedia:Privacy

From Familypedia

The records on Familypedia are meant to form a historic record for the families concerned.

Please do not include private or little-known information about any living individual without specific permission from him or her. Such information may allow identity theft. (However, already public information about public persons, such as George Bush, may be included.)

The general consensus seems to be: include only the individual's names, keeping other items like birth dates off the page, or list only the year. Some people do not like even "public" information such as birth year on the Web.

The more responsible public genealogy databases avoid publishing such information even if it is submitted. For example, WorldConnect accepts and stores GEDCOM files but for display purposes routinely "cleans" such information about any person born less than 100 years ago who is not known to have died. All that appears is, for example, "Living Smith" (son of John Isaac Smith who died in May 2002) married "Living Jones" and they have children "Living Smith" and "Living Smith".

Because most people doing genealogical research are interested in earlier generations, where people were not so well documented as today, there is seldom any need to have living persons on a public page such as this.

Page name for any person born less than 100 years ago who is not known to have died can be shown as follows: "Living Bloggs (YOB)", where Bloggs is the surname in question.

See also: Forum:Social Security Numbers and w:Pages_about_living_people