Simply asking a person's permission would simply lead to chaos. The person whom you ask may agree, but his brother may not. A 110 year rule may be a little excessive. The US census, for example, is in the public domain after 72 years. BMD announcements in newspapers are all a matter of public record; telephone directories, property tax records and the Social Security Death Index are all publicly available sources of information.
Ec
Benjamin Webb wrote:
Hmm. Well Rodovid is designed to have a My Tree button, so would it be alright to have information about yourself? The current policy on Rodovid is ask permision if you are going to include living people. By default living people are not imported during a GEDCOM inport. What do you think of this? What must we do by law, because that is most important, although it would be best to have better privacy.
On 29/03/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
This strikes me as somewhat irresponsible. Some GEDCOM files are huge. Are you suggesting that we just accept them as valid without any standards for verifiability? We also need to address the privacy issues. The copyright question may turn out to be a less critical problem.
The best privacy policy I've seen regarding geneological information is to not list anybody who is currently alive, or in other words does not have a listed death date and is less than 110 years old, under the assumption that people over 110 years of age are so unusual that they deserve special mention anyway, or can be generally assumed to be dead. I think it might be safer for 120 years instead, but that is a fine point to quibble here.
Some exceptions might happen for very famous people, but that is certainly something to express concern over. It is also something that can be automated directly in the software if a policy is set up, where the information can be added but not displayed if it fails the living person criteria.
A good point to raise, however.