Ancestry Cease and Desist order
Ancestry has issued a legal Cease and Desist order against Genome Mate Pro (and presumably also against all third party tools developed over the years to capture your own matches from the Ancestry website for use in 3rd-party tools).
not sure what GMP is or if anyone here uses It , but I’m wondering if this is going to be the case with all the other websites such as FTDNA, GEDmatch ect? I’m pretty sure when we download the raw data, ancestry states it’s our info to do with as we please? But does this mean they’re starting some sort of campaign to stop all that ? Like loading your results from ancestry to other sites?
Genome Mate Pro Statement:
GMP Release 2020r09
Posted r09 to website this morning. Due to a Cease and Desist order from Ancestry, GMP will no longer support Ancestry data.
Ancestry does not provide downloadable DNA relative data and the elimination of third party tools to collect data means that there is no longer a need for GMP to support Ancestry.
All references to Ancestry have been eliminated from GMP but data will not be automatically removed as there is no way to determine what was obtained illegally by the user. That data will be preserved as an archived source and it will be up to the user to cleanse their own database using the tools provided in Options.
Tools provided to analyze Ancestry data have been either removed or repurposed to analyze ICW data as those are sound analysis tools.
@Genetic Genealogy Research
@Adoption and Unknown Family Research
@Family History Research
Answers
-
On Facebook, Blaine Bettinger, the author of Guide to DNA testing and Genetic Genealogy, said:
"As you may know, Ancestry has issued cease and desist letters to several third-party DNA tools asking them to stop scraping data from the site. This was prompted by site accessibility issues caused by scraping, and notably scraping has always been a violation of the Terms of Service. The goal of these tools was to obtain a match list and shared match information, which can be used for automated clustering among other things. I’ve reached out to Ancestry’s CEO to express my wish that this data be made available to users, and to assert the reasons why I believe it should be. It is my understanding that Ancestry is actively collecting information about these tools and why we use them in order to determine what future options there might be. Although it is my personal opinion (NOT legal advice) that using an Ancestry-authorized method to download a match list would not violate the Ancestry ToS or EU/U.S. privacy laws, I understand that privacy is of paramount importance to Ancestry, and that having a spreadsheet of names of people that have tested at Ancestry and share your DNA should NOT be taken lightly. Finding the best path forward that avoids privacy concerns both today and 10 years from now will take time. But I am encouraged that there are indeed discussions happening. We will need to be patient."
0
