Geni Forum » General Discussion
Increasing privacy on Geni.com
(128 posts)-
Geni Team
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Because we enable our users to connect with their family through marriage as well as blood relations, our users have discovered and connected with relatives far beyond the traditional genealogical limitation of blood relatives. However, as trees continue to grow in size, the relationships between distant people become less and less relevant. In the next few weeks, we will make some changes to enhance the privacy and performance of your tree, while preserving your ability to find and connect with family.
Although this change is still a few weeks away from release, we wanted to let you know in advance. This change will help us release long-awaited features such as GEDCOM Import, Tree Merging, Tree Revision History, and more.
What will change?
Currently, anyone connected to you on Geni, whether a blood relative, an in-law, an in-law of an in-law, and so on, can navigate to your part of the tree. In the future, only your blood relatives and their inlaws, plus (if you are married) your spouse’s blood relatives and their inlaws, will be able to navigate to your part of the tree. As you might expect, your tree will still include everyone who is related to you by blood, including all your ancestors and all of their descendants.
- Your Blood Relative is anyone who shares a common ancestor with you.
- Your Tree is all of your blood relatives and their partners.
- Your Forest is your Tree, your spouse's Tree, and all of the Trees directly connected to your Tree (and your spouse’s Tree) through a partner.
- You will only be able to navigate Trees in your Forest.
Here are some diagrams that may help further explain these new tree navigation privacy rules. Please keep in mind that these are small trees for illustration only. Actual trees may be much taller and will include many more navigable nodes. These trees are intentionally short and wide to help illustrate the rules. The multicolored nodes represent married couples, making them part of two Trees. Click on the images for the full size version.
Let's say that this is a portion of your tree on Geni:
You will be able to navigate every node in this tree except for the three solid purple nodes in the top right. These nodes represent your spouse's in-law's in-laws. Every other node will still be navigable. This is indicated by the following diagram:
Now let's see how this will affect other users in your tree. Let's say one of the solid blue nodes has joined the tree. What part of the tree will they be able to navigate? All of the colored nodes in this diagram:
Now let's look at one of the nodes closer to the edge. Here is the portion of the tree that a person represented by a solid green node will be able to navigate:
Again, please keep in mind that this only shows a portion of a small tree as an example. If the tree extended further to the right, the green nodes would be able to see even further along those branches. All of these same rules would apply to all of the ancestors of these nodes as well.
Hopefully this helps illustrate the following: You may be interested in people in the yellow tree and people in the green tree, but these people are not very likely to be interested in each other. In fact the overwhelming feedback we have received is that there is a limited circle of interest, and this relationship would fall outside of that circle for the vast majority of users. I really hope this helps illustrate better what affect this change will have, in any, on your tree.
How to prepare
Until we implement these changes, you can download a copy of your entire tree in GEDCOM format. This industry standard file format will give you a record of your current Geni tree.
Your Feedback
Your feedback in this process is very important to us.
Leave your feedback below.
Posted 1 year ago # -
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If I were someone who was attempting to create an entire family tree by himself, will this prevent me from working on distant relatives? I do know about the export thing but I, along with 2 of my family members, have worked really hard to get as far as we have. It would be awful if we couldnt view the people on our tree we added.
Posted 1 year ago # -
These trees are intentionally short and wide to help illustrate the rules.
My tree really is short and wide :P However, it's true that for me, going beyond the distances shown is just a toy and I don't need more than what's shown.
Posted 1 year ago # -
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What if I was the one who added the three solid purple nodes in the top right?
Posted 1 year ago # -
I am wondering how geni will deal with the counts shown in the User Stats section of the profile. I guess People in My Tree will include only those falling in the new definition of Tree and there will be a new group, People In My Forest. Inlaws will only be those viewable by me in my forest, will not include inlaws of inlaws. The awards are interesting. How will the #1 adder, inviter and uploader be decided? It will only include activity in my tree or my forest? But the count will be different for different users, because my tree and forest is different to most everyone else's. I don't see how these awards can work. The uniqueness of the concept of "tree" that exists now will no longer exist. The concept of "Tree Creator" also becomes questionable, as the concept of what a Tree is will change. It now includes whomever has been added to an original tree, no matter what the relationship is. In the future it will be based on relationships, "all of your blood relatives and their partners". Not that I'm complaining. I know this has to be done for merging and gencom import.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Wait wait, so what happens if someone from outside my "visible" tree leaves a comment on the profile of someone who is? If I click on the person who's outside my "visible" tree, I'll see their public profile _without_ Geni telling me my relationship to them? Or will geni still tell me "so and so's brother's sister's mom's husband's dog's father's son?" (note that some of that made no sense)?
I'd still like geni to tell me the relationship if I see someone random on a birthday greeting to someone I know and click on them, that just happened :P
Posted 1 year ago # -
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Is it at all possible to give the creator of the tree the option to change this setting? Or maybe give each individual user the option of setting their part of the tree to hide?
Posted 1 year ago # -
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Been through 2 or 3 closed topics & still haven't answered:
WHY IS THIS BEING DONE??
Posted 1 year ago # -
Will the statistics show "Forest creator" instead of "Tree creator"?
What if someone before the change adds profiles to a branch that he won't be able to see after the change and changes his settings so that profiles he created can't be changed by anyone else?
What happens to "Added by" in the profiles I added for inlaws of inlaws? Will my name disappear from those nodes or still have the link to my profile?
What happens when I added photos before the change of someone that I won't be able to see after the change? Will the photo tag disappear in my album? I often did this because inlaws of inlaws put group photos or landscape photos as profile photos, and I then cut out their face, uploaded as a new photo and chose as their profile photo. Many people (especially older ones) didn't know how to do it themselves, and I have had the role as "support" or "administrator".
What happens to the tree discussion? If someone leaves a message and someone else replies, those two people often belong to different trees in the same forest. Who will be able to see which messages? It will be strange if replies to replies will be visible but not the first reply in-between.
Will it be possible to invite people to my "Tree group" even if they should belong to other trees in my forest? Maybe if I made friends with inlaws of inlaws, I will want to share my photo albums with them. Or will it be possible to invite inlaws of inlaws (in the same forest but different tree) as friends on Geni?
Will I be able to see both number of people in my tree and number of people in my forest?
Probably this change will be good in the long run, but it raises many questions. And partly it destroys the concept of "everyone's related". Even if we are all related somehow, that won't be visible anymore.
And what about the cycle relationships between people in different trees in the same forest? Will that process be the same as the future tree merging (or forest merging, as that now actually will be)?
Posted 1 year ago # -
I am the creator of my Tree. I have put 284 people in my Tree...that's a lot of work. I do NOT want to lose the ability to view any of it! Example: Will I still be able to view my ex-husbands branch of the tree? We have one child in common...but that child has half-sisters from his father, as well as Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc on his fathers side. I am also in contact with / connected to these people, even though they are not "blood" relatives.
It seems like this new "rule of privacy" is going to make things WAY confusing!
I don't see anyone on here going "yeah! great idea!"Posted 1 year ago # -
I personally love it. It's a great compromise to the privacy issue, and I see how it needed to be done before GEDCOM import begins.
To not blur the lines of who is family and who is not, I'd like to suggest that instead of adding the more distant people to your "family" group, you can add distant people to your friends and allow them to view your profile as friends.
I'd like it you could still show you the relationship path when you view the person's profile. Eventually, we'll all be related, so it'll be fun to know how!
Posted 1 year ago # -
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@Patricia: Everyone on here has made a huge investment in their trees (hasn't someone entered 20,000 profiles? I have done 1,200 and can't bear the thought of doing any more). Anyway, that's why Geni is getting so much resistance here. These are the users with the most to lose.
@Sarolite: I think it's good anticipation by Geni. Once tree merging happens (IMHO, GEDCOM is less of an issue) then there's the potential of being suddenly and unexpectedly connected to any number of unknown people. They can develop it now, and endure the flak on this forum, or they can develop it after there's a huge backlash when tree merging happens and people start clamoring for privacy.
Posted 1 year ago # -
<p>Is it at all possible to give the creator of the tree the option to change this setting? Or maybe give each individual user the option of setting their part of the tree to hide?
</p>Which tree?
What I mean is that the definition of "tree" will change. It will only include blood relatives and their spouses. So the concept of tree creator will no longer be meaningful. The "tree creator" we know today will not exist, as I see it. Existing tree creators will have to realize they do not own their trees anymore. And when you think about it, that makes the most sense. This is a collaborative project. When you invite others to join, they become equal partners, with the same edit rights as you. They invite their own family some of whom will intersect with yours and some won't. As time goes by the original tree creator becomes a statistical curiosity. It seems geni is not for people who want their own personal trees that they totally own and control. There are other websites that offer that.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Geni Team
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I had an engineer run a quick analysis of ten trees randomly selected from the forums users who expressed concern on the original thread. Here is what the analysis found:
- 5 of Trees were not affected at all.
- 6 of 10 Tree Creators were still able to navigate every node they added to the tree.
- 3 of the 4 remaining Tree Creators lost the ability to navigate less than 12 nodes on their tree.
So 9 of 10 Tree Creators lost at most 12 nodes that they added from their tree (some of which are include thousands of profiles).
Ironically, the Tree Creator of the 10th tree, the largest and most affected tree, is the person that most strongly supports these changes!
Posted 1 year ago # -
@rdeaguiar I totally agree that it makes more sense to put this in place now than wait until there's a privacy issue. And it's also true that once merging occurs there'll be more of these in-laws thrice-removed than with GEDCOM import. Maybe everyone should start taking this as a good sign that those two things are coming!
As to a user changing settings, you can change the privacy setting for your own profile, or you can add the people you want as your friends. You have no business saying that other people and their entire family should be visible by someone who bears no real relation to them.
Posted 1 year ago # -
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@Sarolite: Agreed.
@Noah: Thanks! This is great. Is this analysis easy to run? Could someone request it through help@geni.com ?
Posted 1 year ago # -
Geni Team
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Hope these comments help, let's keep the discussion going - I'll try to answer as many questions as possible.
@Gormanilius, JimHere: I haven't had the opportunity to play around with these changes yet, but I hope that when I do I will be able to let each of you know exactly how you will be affected, if at all.
@malcolm, Nixie: Not sure how this will affect tree awards and so on, I'll try to find out. One idea is to allow you to invite users outside of your navigable tree to your Family group. Thoughts?
@Aditya: If you view the profile of anyone in your navigable tree, regardless of how you get to their profile, it should show you the relationship path.
@johnntravis: As stated in 2 of 3 related posts - "In the next few weeks, we will make some changes to enhance the privacy and performance of your tree, while preserving your ability to find and connect with family."
@Patricia: Yes, you will still be able to see your ex-husband's branch of the tree. At a minimum all of those people are in a blood tree in your forest. I need to check the exact rules for ex-spouses, but they may even count as your spouse's blood tree, which means you can also see their in-law's trees!
Posted 1 year ago # -
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@rdeaguiar: You are correct, one of the motivations (see 'privacy' above) is to anticipate the impending release of Tree Merging, GEDCOM Import, etc. Without these changes, a user with a 'private' family tree may one day find that they have been imported and merged into a tree with 30,000+ people! Obviously not every user would be okay with this.
In order to make tree privacy meaningful and enable use to release these most requested features some change along these lines is required. This greatly simplifies the privacy issues are Tree Merging while at the same time greatly enhancing our user's actual and perceived privacy.
Keep in mind with these rules, and especially with merging and import, trees can still grow infinitely (well, I suppose the limit of a genealogically accurate Geni tree is the number of humans that have ever existed, if there aren't any pets on the tree!).
Posted 1 year ago # -
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@rdeaguiar: It takes some time right because an engineer needs to run it for me. Hopefully next week I will be able to run these myself and let each of you know exactly what the impact will be on your tree. That said, rdeaguiar, your tree is on the list I have already requested for analysis, so I should be able to let you know. I'll send you a PM?
Posted 1 year ago # -
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For now I think I will go through and accept the change, and once you guys implement it I will be able to give you more informed feedback. SO a quick question, will I still be able to create profiles of my inlaws?
Posted 1 year ago #
Topic Closed
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