Whose responsibility to provide privacy for the living?
I have always wondered about the criteria FamilySearch applies when it comes to displaying details of, and records for, individuals who are still alive.
When an individual is marked as "Living" in Family Tree, we find the user who created the ID is the only one who can view the details (in their "private space"). I wonder, (I've never examined) how this works with trees in Genealogies? If the same, obviously there is at least some consistency here.
However, there is certainly no hiding records for the living on the website when one excludes Family Tree. We can find births and marriages and (for some countries - notably the U.S.) census records that help us construct detailed profiles of living persons - both related and otherwise, of course.
I wonder if someone (employee or anyone with background knowledge) can advise of the criteria applied here (legal or otherwise) - particularly when it comes to the apparent inconsistencies in FamilySearch freely publishing personal (albeit public domain) data on the main website, yet it choosing (having to?) keep such detail out of public view within Family Tree?
Finally - in line with the discussion title - who really is responsible for the privacy of those Family Tree profiles currently marked "Deceased", when many of these are still very much alive? For example, I wrote to another user yesterday suggesting he should change the status of two siblings born in 1948 (two of triplets - one died in infancy), for whom there is no evidence of death. Having noticed this matter, should I take the responsibility to mark them as "Living", or leave it to him to take that action?
Answers
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Playing around in Genealogies, at least in the user uploaded GEDCOM Pedigree Resource Files section, I've found that only the user who uploaded a GEDCOM there can see living people in that file. I haven't really ever looked at the other sections.
From a discussion years ago on the old getsatisfaction boards where someone complained about his own birth record being public on FamilySearch (I think this was in a database of California births) the FamilySearch employee who commented on that matter stated that the rules for a database were set by the owner of the record set. By California state law, if that was the state involved, all California birth records were public. So they are public in that record set in Family Search. Likewise, since US federal law states that census records are public after 72 years, the 1950 census is public on FamilySearch and everywhere else even though it is full of living people. The Family Tree record set would fall under whatever laws and regulations apply to that kind of database which are evidently much stricter.
Regarding responsibility for Family Tree data, are you referring to the responsibility for making sure Family Tree has the most accurate data possible? All of us users share equally in that so if we have clear information that a person marked deceased is still alive then I think we should mark the profile living and include that information. If we don't have any sources, I don't think it is fair to FamilySearch to send them a bunch of profiles with the complaint "they don't seem old enough to be deceased" and overburden whatever team fixes these. I think we're stuck just messaging the user who marked the person deceased and suggesting they either source the death information or change the person to living.
But if you are referring to enforcing the rules of conduct for Family Tree, I think that is murkier. If you see a bank being robbed is it your responsibility to call the police? Or to just leave it to the bank to take care of things? I think most people would call the police. Taking the same sort of societal contract to help support the law in reference to Family Tree, reporting living people marked as deceased to FamilySearch whenever we run across them is a benefit to all users. Particularly if doing so keeps FamilySearch out of any privacy violation lawsuits in which they would have to spend tons of money defending themselves instead of using those funds to improve the website and improve user support.
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My opinion, for what it's worth, if I'm certain of the facts about a living person who has been marked deceased, I submit the details to FS and ask that the status be changed.
I believe that an uploaded GEDCOM to Genealogies does not include living persons. See: https://https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/what-happens-to-information-uploaded-from-a-gedcom-file
(emphasis mine)
In the Pedigree Resource File, the following information is available for other FamilySearch users to see:
Your FamilySearch contact name and information. The date you submitted the file. The deceased people in your tree, including name, sex, birth, christening, marriage, death, and burial. The relationships between the deceased people in your tree as spouses, parents, and children.
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A gedcom uploaded to Genealogies can include living individuals but they are, as Gordon said, locked from public view. I have a couple that I've tested out and I can see the living individuals in them but no one else can.
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Thank you for those responses, particularly in confirming the position with living persons that have been added to the Genealogies section.
I later remembered that it required an administrator to make a change in status in Family Tree (Deceased to Living) to become permanent.
As you know, there have been regular complaints about the profiles of living individuals being carelessly added with the wrong status, which makes it so important that extreme care should be taken in transferring data from more recent census returns directly to Family Tree - as these census records are likely to include very many persons who are still alive today.
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