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Part of my Private Persons list is not my doing. I want to delete them.
Are they perhaps contributions from other members of a Family Group Tree? If so, and you disagree with them, you will need to contact the relevant contributor(s) and discuss the situation with them.
You can only delete profiles that you have created yourself and that no-one else has edited since.
Profiles do also sometimes get made Confidential by a bot which spots references to certain locations - is this perhaps happening here? There are multiple threads here on Community about such issues.
Having said which, a few months ago there was a thread here concerning mystery entries that had appeared in someone's Private Persons list for no obvious reason (they appeared to be profiles created internally by FamilySearch in the early 2010s but edited at some point by the user who was seeing the spurious Private entries). The situation was reported to FS Support and we never heard the upshot. If your situation is not Family Group or Confidentiality-location-bot related, please post here again and I will see if I can fish out that similar thread.
I would be interested in that thread. I have 2 people who showed up on my Private Persons list. Both of them are records I have modified, but both of them are deceased so there is no reason to be private.
I could delete them, but they are real people and I hate to do that.
This is the thread I mentioned:
I don't know how to delete them. They are living people that i'm sure don't want their names created. And if they see that I created them they would not be happy. I happen to know a few of them. We are not related and are not part of any tree together. I just want to delete them so I don't get blamed.
Community members can't see your Living people for privacy reasons, and we are not permitted to discuss Living people here, so there's a limit to how much we can help you.
Have you looked at the change logs to see who created them? If it is not you, I can't see that you need to do anything, but you might like to contact the creator(s) to discuss the matter (click on their username in the change log), although they aren't obliged to respond.
If you find that you yourself created a profile (whether through the FS website, or maybe via a third party product like RootsMagic, or perhaps via a gedcom import?) but you now want to delete it, see the 'Delete Person' option at the bottom right of its Details tab. If it is not greyed out, that's how you delete the profile. If it is greyed out, click the 'why can't I delete this person' link provided for further instructions.
If profiles are showing spuriously on your Private Persons list (you didn't create them, and they aren't in a Family Group you are a member of) and you want them to stop appearing on the list, FS Support may be able to help.
I checked my Private People list yesterday after reading this post. My list shows 170 private people.
I found two private (living) people that have "FamilySearch" as the creator, with a creation date of 1 June 2012.
What does that mean? I created those profiles on the earlier platform. When the new platform came online, the tree profiles from the earlier platform were carried over, but the name of the creator could not be brought over, for privacy reasons.
Since only the person who creates a profile for a living person can see that profile, I see no reason why your experience would be different.
Aine, your explanation undoubtedly covers the 'spurious entries' noted on the previous relevant thread, so that's another mystery solved - thank you!
