"Confidential Persons"

Curtis Gayle Richins

Hello,

Have any of you experienced a person/record you are working on ending up as a "Confidential Person." If you go to "My Contributions" and then "Private Persons" it will list if someone is "Confidential." I don't know how that record got there and I don't know how to get it back to the general public tree.

Any help you can give would be very much appreciated.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I haven't experienced it personally (thank goodness), but it comes up in this forum fairly regularly: the designation is due to a bot that's programmed to object to locations in the Middle East. This is purportedly a protective action on FS's part, but I have yet to ever see a satisfactory explanation of who exactly it's protecting, and, more importantly, from what. I have also not seen any instructions on a reliable process for objecting to the bot's objections or undoing its work. The (extremely terse) Help Center articles on the topic (such as https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/are-the-confidential-people-in-my-family-tree-private-space-ever-made-public) simply refer to contacting Support, with a link to the Contact Us page.

The workaround to all this is deleting the confidential profile (if possible) and starting fresh, avoiding all mention of the Middle East in placename fields. Put those locations in the Reason box instead, where the bot doesn't look but people can.

Curtis Gayle Richins

Thank you. I will give it a try.

Paul W

Family Tree administrators (whether by their manual actions or employing a robot) should surely strive to keep confidential and read-only profiles to an absolute minimum.

At present, there is evidence that inconsistent reasoning is being applied in many cases - whether that relates to an individual being famous, or the country to which their vitals are associated. I find I can edit the profiles of some very famous individuals, or even edit / see those associated with "sensitive areas" of the world (in some cases) - but it it doubtful we will ever get a precise list of the criteria used by FamilySearch in differentiating between "public / editable", "public / read only" and purely "confidential" profiles.

Curtis Gayle Richins

Thank you.

Gab233

My ancestor was a European citizen but born in French or Spanish Morocco. But over 150 years ago so their explanations still don't fit.