Acknowledge the existence of the living

LegacyUser

Darrel LeVan Russon said: I understand why we are not allowed to view records of living persons who are not our direct ancestors. What becomes confusing is that familysearch gives the illusion that these other living persons don’t exist. For example, in my parents family group, I’m shown as an only child but I have 5 siblings who are not shown. Why not acknowledge the existence of these living persons by showing entries for them without conveying any information about them, i.e. show an entry with just “living” written in it & make it inactive so clicking on it doesn’t do anything. If you don’t want to even reveal the sex or birth order, leave out the blue or pink bar & establish the convention of showing these entries after all the ones that can be viewed.
Alternatively you could just have a line of text appear saying something like “5 additional living descendants”.

LegacyUser

Paul said: As others will probably point out, the problem mainly relates to data protection laws. FamilySearch / Family Tree has users worldwide, so there is a need to comply with the (often strict) regulations of many other countries.

Also, because you would be happy with the display of certain family information on the website, it doesn't mean some of your relatives would necessarily feel the same way.

BTW - I believe FamilySearch has been working for some time on a way for close relatives to share a "private space", so they could see & share details of their immediate families, but this has to be very carefully thought through to avoid any possible legal challenges.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: First, welcome to the community-powered feedback forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

Basically, what you are asking for is, in some jurisdictions, prohibited by law. This can include an indication of the number of living persons in a family (without names or other information). It all depends upon how the laws are written.

We have been told by FS personnel that the logistics are still being worked out and coded. They feel they have met the legal requirements in their goals, but the coding of such, with no chance of violating any law, even if exposed through a bug, is paramount.

LegacyUser

Juli said: If you're really, really, really bothered by looking like an only child, just enter profiles for your siblings. Only you'll be able to see those profiles, so you can put whatever you want in them (although I'd still be leery of personally-identifying details, in case of security breach).

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: I suspect that it's actually slightly more difficult for the system to put any dummy / blank entries into your private space than you might imagine.

Suppose you and each of your 5 siblings have your own private space and suppose further that your parents are still alive. If (and it's a big if because I'm not a member of the Church) I understand things correctly, then each of those parents has a different PID in each of your private spaces. So rather than one pair of parents with 6 children, all the system can see is 6 pairs of parents each with one child (if none of you have entered your siblings). Presumably you'd eventually see the same grandparents or great-grandparents but there is still nothing to say that the later descendents of the deceased are the same person or not.

And if any of you followed Juli's suggestion and put in profiles for your siblings, there's no way that the system would know that sibling A in your private space matched sibling A in someone else's - could be just coincidence....

Aside from that, I'd also caution against FS revealing anything about the configuration of other families. Many times I've looked at Ancestry trees and worked out just who is who, even though all the tree says is "Living" - just put what my relative has said, together with the publically available records, check the numbers of children - et voila!

LegacyUser

joe martel said: Regarding privacy. There are certainly ways to accomplish this (think consent forms you do for say medical). 
Putting a blank box exposes private info. Inference is one of important considerations in privacy.

For example.
I go to my living tree and see me and my sister and my parents.

Later, my mom goes and adds a child (brother to me) they had before we were born and we never knew about. Since that brother is living she knows know one else can see him except her. 

Next time I go to the tree, I see me and my sister, and a blank sibling box. What? I call my sister. She calls my dad. He's surprised. We call mom. Oops. 

So inference is part of the privacy shield.

LegacyUser

Darrel LeVan Russon said: OK, plenty of responders have told me why my suggestion can’t be done. Still, the private space system is confusing to many users. The message in the light yellow bar that appears with a living person doesn’t really explain what is going on - like the separate copies of the living person that each descendent has in their own private space. For example, my father recently died and as his descendants entered his death date into their private space records of him, those records then became public & we suddenly saw multiple copies of him appearing as children in his parent’s family group. Further, each of those copies except our own appeared to be a dangling copy unconnected to our living mother & any descendants.
None of us understood what was happening except for my brother & he only understood it because he had consulted with a familysearch expert.

I suggest that there be included in the message in the light yellow bar a generic statement indicating that there may be related living persons who cannot be shown and also include in it a link to an article that would explain the private space system. An article that would explain things like the situation with my father & what needs to be done as a person moves to public space.

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: I think all you have to do is merge all the duplicate records of your father and it resolves the issue. same as any other duplicate issue.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: I think Darrel's point is that he simply wasn't expecting this sort of thing. It's easy for us to get round (he said...) but you have to expect something in the first place.

You might very well have got your head round the idea of the massive tree being (hopefully) just one profile for each human - but because you never see multiple private spaces at once you don't realise that the same does not apply to private spaces in that his father appeared multiple times - once in each private space, even though he was connected to (I presume) just a single set of parents.

In fact, the more I think about it, the less obvious to a non-Jedi-IT-expert this multiple profiles across multiple private spaces behaviour becomes.