Ancestry changes, Weekend Fun, and New listings...

Aug 06, 2021 11:01 pm

Hope you've had a great week and your weekend includes some family history!

Ancestry.com

If you have an Ancestry account be sure to read up on the changes to their terms of service. This is the paragraph that is raising eyebrows:

"Also, by submitting User Provided Content through any of the Services, you grant Ancestry a perpetual, sublicensable, worldwide, non-revocable, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, publish, distribute, provide access to, create derivative works of, and otherwise use such User Provided Content to the extent and in the form or context we deem appropriate on or through any media or medium and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed or discovered. This includes the right for Ancestry to copy, display, and index your User Provided Content. Ancestry will own the indexes it creates. Notwithstanding the non-revocable and perpetual nature of this license, it terminates when your User Provided Content is deleted from our systems. Be aware that to the extent you elected to make your User Provided Content public and other users copied or saved it to the Services, this license continues until the content has been deleted both by you and the other users."

Judy G. Russell, The Legal Genealogist, has a post updated as of today, explaining how this affects users. You can also read Roberta Estes, DNAeXplained - Genetic Genealogy blogpost with her concerns about the changes to the terms of service.

My tree at Ancestry is public and anyone can copy uploaded photos and documents and use them in their own tree and I'm fine with that. I'm going to double check my tree, but I think everything I've shared is material I'm willing to let others use for their own benefit. If the terms of service mean anything nefarious, I'll be disappointed in Ancestry, but it's a risk I'm willing to take to help others researching the same family lines.

If you have concerns, always keep your Ancestry tree private. Even if you move your tree from public to private, I'm not sure you can control the use of anything that has already been copied by other users (Roberta Estes thinks you have till September 3, 2021 to reclaim this privacy right--and she may be correct). I think most people assumed that was a risk when they made their trees pubic in the first place. If not, lesson learned, keep your tree private.

Weekend Fun

I'm going to search my old photos and movie files and try to find pictures of our family at Disneyland on the Jungle Cruise. I'm sure my teenagers have no memory of the fun we had (we rode it over and over when they were small and tired and we got a different boat captain each time) but it'll be a good laugh to watch the family videos of the boat captains giving the same spiel and then we'll watch the new movie release of Jungle Cruise. In a trailer I heard some of the same lines, "the back side of water" and others so I can't wait to relive the memories.