Geni Forum » General Discussion
New Features: Increased Privacy on Geni
(107 posts)-
Geni Team
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Privacy online is very important, especially for children. We've made a couple of enhancements to improve your family's privacy on Geni:
Child Privacy
New Child Privacy settings give you control over the profiles you manage for those under 13 years of age. You can restrict the viewing and editing of their profile. Profiles for those under 13 are never included in search results, and only their relatives and their inlaws can find their profiles from the tree.
Family Group
Your Family Group consists of the relatives that you want to stay in touch with. This is the group that you will share news, photo albums, and birthdays with. We've reduced the default Family Group from your 5th cousins and closer to your 3rd cousins and closer. How does this affect you?
- Additional Privacy: Since the Family Group is used for profile privacy and permissions, your Family will have more privacy by default.
- Family News: You and your Family will receive fewer, more relevant Family News stories. Your Family News page should also have less 'noise'.
- Ancestor Permissions: Because the Family Group is used for profile privacy, this will affect which profiles you can view by default. This means that you would have had less viewing privileges for some of your ancestors. To remedy this we now let users view the full profile of any of their ancestors.
Keep in mind that you can continue to use the "Invite to Family Group" buttons to add your more distant relatives to your Family Group.
Posted 9 months ago # -
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I'm surprised this sticky post was used to replace the previous one regarding reduced family tree size, considering the previous discussion was so cheery and full of excitement about the upcoming change.
Posted 9 months ago # -
Your sarcasm is duly noted.
The prior discussion, which showed that most all of the Geni regulars think this update sucked, is here: http://forum.geni.com/topic.php?id=36461
Posted 9 months ago # -
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Pathetic! How many of you have seen any user request asking for limiting the access from 5th cousins to 3rd cousin? This has nothing to do with improved privacy, but about watering down the Genealogy side of Geni. Absolutely pathetic...
Since Noah forks the thread, I will repeat here that if you set your family group to immediate family or to none, you will still see news items for third cousins. Family Group alone does not decide what you see in your family news. You can test this by going to your family group settings, change the setting and then go back to family news
Posted 9 months ago # -
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And, to summarize for newcomers: since yesterday your 4th and 5th cousins are no longer part of your family. They will not show as such in any listing. You will not be able to see that they're your 4th or 5th cousins unless you've paid for being a Pro user and you click on a button to 'calculate' it. You won't hear anything about them in the family news. If you open their profile, you'll see their Public profile, the same that any stranger will see. You have no choice about this.
Noah is doing his PR job in trying to make this sound like an improvement. It isn't. Some features have been removed for reasons we haven't been told. Possibly to save resources, possibly to later sell that functionality back to you. Either way, certainly not to serve you better.
Posted 9 months ago # -
Very disappointed. My family size reduced from 350 to 275. I can't believe this change was put through.
Posted 9 months ago # -
"Your family tree on Geni is growing! You now have 3966 relatives in your family tree."
Recieved 23 Jan
Then on 6 Feb:
"Your family tree on Geni is growing! You now have 1273 relatives in your family tree."I think someone needs some maths lessons!
PinklePosted 9 months ago # -
OK now this is a huge downgrade. Some of my relatives that are listed in my blood relatives no longer show relationship path!!! How will this impact GEDCOM export are you no longer going to export past 3rd cousins too?!
Posted 9 months ago # -
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To reiterate, laaaaame...
Posted 9 months ago # -
Sure, we can view all of our ancestors now, but can we edit them all? We may no longer be in the family group of the person who manages the profile. I still don't like it.
Posted 9 months ago # -
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You should not be able to edit it unless you are a family group member of the manager.
Hopefully I did not discover a serious bug just now: The "more", "Move this person" menu was active on a profile belonging to someone that is NOT in my family group.
This is the classical way of hijacking a tree: Initiate a merge the profile managers is not able to "Undo" or complete because they have no edit accesss.
This should be checked immediately.
Posted 9 months ago # -
Geni Team
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"Move this person" is more or less equivalent to adding onto existing profiles. This permission is enabled for your entire forest, not just your Family Group.
Posted 9 months ago # -
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"Move this person" is a more serious action than being able to edit a profile in my opinion. You should simply not be able to perform this action without having permission from both the source and target position.
Isn't this the main reason for all the "cannot display tree" errors, - somebody have initiated a profile merge without edit access to complete the merge with the result that you have a double set of parents?
Posted 9 months ago # -
Dear Noah,
Reducing the size of the family group by excluding all relatives beyond third cousins is ABSOLUTELY THE MOST STUPID CHANGE YOU HAVE DONE. I have so much enjoyed finding some sixth cousins even from other countries and establishing personal contacts with them, and now you require that the contact should be based on an invitation of these relatives, or alternatively the profiles and events in the lives of these slightly more distant cousins are kept out of an individual user's sight. This really frustrates a seriously genealogy-oriented Geni user. It gives Geni an over-superficial flavour of "a Facebook for the closest family"... very much contrary to the original vision promoted earlier.
Who on earth has wanted to implement such changes? Not the majority of users I think.
I strongly urge you to return to the previous boundaries of family group.
Thanks though for the increased privacy for children - that does make a lot of sense.
Extremely disappointed,
Eero Ignatius
FinlandPosted 9 months ago # -
So it seems that following these changes my own 7xgt grandfather is only a distant relative but the phraseology used by geni is Whacky to say the least:
My 7xgt grandfather was described tonight as "your yourself's relative's second great grandfather"
and the tree walk through:
You
→
TERRY JACKSON
your yourself
→
TERRY JACKSON
her yourself
→
How are you related?.....n her relative; w her father; x his father; y his father; z his father.I must say this is a GREAT IMPROVEMENT! (sarcasm) on what went before.
Pinkle
Posted 9 months ago # -
Geni Team
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@PINKLE Please send this one to help so we can look at it, this sounds like a bug.
Posted 9 months ago # -
I am so disappointed that Geni has decided to sneak this in on us.. I have worked so hard to find and start communicating with distant relatives... We have been sharing storied, albums etc. Now even their albums are gone from my site... I know it is free but I went into it knowing this and with options which were put out there by Geni. Now they are taking them away... At least be honest about why you are doing this...
Posted 9 months ago # -
Ok, you've got me by the balls. How much do I have to pay per month to get back what used to be free?
If I set my own profile to be completely public, will my entire tree be able to view it?
Posted 9 months ago # -
Geni Team
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@molund: you don't have to pay anything in this case, you just need to invite the fourth and fifth cousins you are interested to join your Family Group. And yes, if you set your entire profile to be public than everyone in your tree will be able to view it.
Posted 9 months ago # -
If I invited somebody to the tree, and they joined Geni because of my invitation, then they should automatically be in my family group. I shouldn't have to send a 2nd request after they already join.
Posted 9 months ago #
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