Confidential?
Can you please clarify why GH68-DVX is marked as confidential. I can't see any reason for this and would like it to be removed.
Answers
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As I thought, I find no results when I search the tree for that ID. You are the only one who can see that person and you are likely the one who created that person. Is that person marked alive? Is that person really deceased? If so, then go ahead and put the death date in. There may be location considerations for certain parts of the world. I am not sure when you have created a person who lived and died in certain parts of the world, a problem can result, but I believe in that case they wouldn't be confidential, they would be read only.
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To add to what has been suggested, here is a link to an article that should explain it.
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I have a similar scenario with GGGC-Q3R. I created this person in late December 2023, marked as deceased at creation time, and with birth and death dates. From memory, he immediately became a confidential person, and there is nothing in his All Changes log to indicate that this has even happened.
The article mentioned in the previous post says, in part:
"Administrators mark records as confidential if the ability for the public to view the information could harm the contributor. We do not accept user requests to mark records as confidential."
This individual's marriage, death and burial records are publicly available. I have only a far-fetched idea how I might be harmed by revelation of his existence in FamilySearch.
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I agree with the comments of @Gail Swihart Watson, except that a main reason for them being confidential would relate to the "sensitive area" in the world with which they have been associated. Read-only profiles usually apply to (LDS) church leaders and certain famous individuals. Apart from anyone of "Living" status, FamilySearch has never advised us of the exact criteria it uses to designate an individual as confidential - or read-only.
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I continue to lack anything even vaguely resembling an adequate or even sensible explanation of the reason for confidential status. Like Julian, I cannot come up with any scenario in which a contributor on FS could possibly be harmed by the existence of a profile for a deceased person -- and I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy.
Instead of fighting against FS's nonsensical practice, I suggest deleting the confidential profile (if possible) and re-entering it, this time without any mention of the offending part of the world in any field that the (mindless, fully-automated) bot looks in. If a soldier died in WWII in a battle in Egypt, put that in the reason box for his death, not the place field. (From what I can glean from the many similar questions here in Community, the offending part of the world is basically the Middle East and southern Mediterranean. It may be determined based on majority religion of the country.)
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Your question has been forwarded to a specialty team for review and resolution. You may be contacted by that team if they need to gather more information.
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I've had this happen a lot with Armenian ancestors I've added, many over a century old, all built from internal FS sources anybody can access. It's inconsistent and seems to border on ethnic erasure.
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@Bryan54 Thank you. This has now been resolved. I appreciate the prompt attention to the matter. I've just discovered, though, that there is another one, a younger sibling of the person previously reported. See G7VV-8QR. Can you please also refer this case.
I have been working through my private list to clean up any straggly bits and pieces as part of a move to using Family Group Trees, and came across these as part of that process.
Thanks again.
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Joseph Clayton Longman G7VV-8QR
That one seems to be coming up OK.
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Hi @Bryan54 yes it is fine now. When I received confirmation that the other one was fixed I replied with this information. All good. Thanks again.
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We seem to be dancing round an important point here.
Let me state immediately that I have every sympathy with the idea of making certain profiles confidential. It seems to me that it is an excellent idea to protect a (current) Muslim by obscuring the fact that one of their relatives converted from Islam to the LDS Church (say). That's just my basic reaction and I may be missing lots of things - but they are not, I contend, relevant to the important point that I want to make. By the way, I would also assume that it's never a good idea to reveal the exact criteria in protection logic.
However, thanks to the prompt work to de-confidentialise the profile(s) in question, I can see that the profiles in question belong to families who appear, from the names, to be wholly European in origin, who have simply been out in India for at least years, sometimes generations. Fairly typical of the "British Raj", or whatever you care to call it.
If being born, married or buried somewhere in what is now India, Pakistan or Bangladesh (or ?) is what triggers the confidentiality, then FamilySearch has rendered the study of the genealogy of Christian, European families in that area, hugely difficult, if not impossible.
To avoid such issues for these families, I think it's entirely reasonable to ask FamilySearch to reveal its criteria in this case - otherwise I think it's entirely reasonable for me to avoid any mention of South Asia in my relatives' stories, which makes FS useless as a repository for their full stories.
If we need to add something to their profiles to help keep them visible - fine, I'm happy to do that. But what?
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@MarlenePitman - if you're cleaning up, then you might want to look at Joseph Clayton Longman's 1936 death and burial - based on the screenshot above (and you may have altered it by now) - those 2 events are in different Hyderabads - one in Sind, one in Bombay. I'm guessing one is wrong. Hope you don't mind me mentioning it but I do respect anyone who commits to cleaning stuff up!
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@Adrian Bruce1, the thing is, the existence of a profile on FS reveals absolutely nothing about the relatives of the contributors to that profile, because there is no requirement that one be in any way related or even connected to the people whose profiles one edits.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi - weirdly I've only just realised that the justification includes the phrase "if the ability for the public to view the information could harm the contributor". Yes - I totally agree. How on earth the researcher is likely to get harmed I can't imagine.
To be clear - my sympathy is based on the risk of the following, different, scenario: Two siblings are born Muslim, one (call them A for ease) converts to a form of Christianity. The other (B) remains Muslim. Suppose B's living Muslim descendants are identifiable from what's in FS FamilyTree, then is there a risk to them today from being associated with the apostate A? The likelihood might be low - but the impact on B's descendants might be high, making the risk a material one.
(How does anyone know that A converted? I guess having a Residence event of Salt Lake City might be a bit of a giveaway, but perhaps more likely is an ordinary Christian baptism event for A or their own children. So it's possible.)
That scenario is why I have sympathy with the confidentiality process and I'll swear I didn't invent it - I thought that was the justification, hence why I missed the contributor angle - not least because, as you say, it doesn't make sense. D'uh.
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My "far-fetched idea" about GGGC-Q3R seems to be right on the money, in fact. He was born just over a hundred years ago in Palestine. When he was a little over a year old, his father and two co-workers were murdered by robbers during a hold-up. His mother returned to her home country (Ireland) where her second child was born two or three months after the father's death. A few months later, the family of three emigrated to the father's home country (New Zealand), and that seems to be the end of their connection with the Middle East.
It seems that his birthplace was the sole trigger for his being marked as "confidential" immediately after I had created his profile.
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It's a bug. I had it happen to me, also. I deleted the record and then came back the next day and re-entered the same data with no issues.
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@DarSwedberg, can you confirm whether you restored the original profile that you deleted or created a brand new profile with the same information?
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@DarSwedberg After seeing your post, I decided yesterday (June 10) to create a new public profile for the confidential person (GGGC-Q3R) that I referred to in my previous post of March 7. I copied all the data into the new profile with the exception of the place of birth, and transferred all the sources to the new profile. Nothing unusual happened; the new profile remained public. Several hours later, I added the place of birth to the new profile. Again, nothing unusual happened before I decided to call it a day.
Today (June 11), I find that the new profile has become confidential. Rather than there being a bug, there appears to be some sticky-beak bot that is doing this in the background. It doesn't even have the courtesy to make an entry in the profile's change log.
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