[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki, wishes to become a wiki project

[Ray Saintonge]

Benjamin Webb wrote:

>On 01/04/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>Yourself, perhaps.  I understand in part that you want to show a full
>>family tree starting with yourself and going to your ancestors (or
>>decendants if you are older).  The problem here is that this information
>>is all going to be publicly available for anybody to use and have
>>access.  Indeed, a very, very common "security question" used to help
>>prevent identity theft is to ask what your mother's maiden name was.  By
>>publishing full geneological links in a public place like on a Wikimedia
>>project, you are inviting fraud, identity theft, and violation of
>>several personal privacy laws.  With the Wikimedia Foundation so
>>paranoid about something so insignificant as an IP address connected to
>>a user account and the hyper paranoid (in my opinion) check user policy,
>>this might be enough to kill this whole proposal completely in terms of
>>violating privacy laws.
>>
>>More important, the suggestion here is that other living relatives may
>>also be listed if a policy like this isn't implemented.  They did not
>>give concent to have their information posted in a public forum, even if
>>on a technical level the information is available through public records
>>like birth certificates and driver's license registrations.
>>
>>I completely agree that this is a sticky issue.  I'm just suggesting
>>that some thought needs to go into it and I'm also suggesting what other
>>groups are doing who publish geneological information in a public forum.
>>    
>>
>I understand the need for being cautious about security and I think that
>your comment that the subject is something that needs to be thought hard
>about is exactly right. However, there's one thing that I have been
>wondering about. You have raised the point that identity theft could be
>carried out, using the mother's maiden name. As, Rodovid grows and the
>number of people with the same increases, it will be difficult to link a
>person whose identity you are trying to steal with someone on the database.
>To do this would mean having other data such as age, place of birth and so
>on, which would probably be as difficult to obtain as  the maiden name.
>
These other data may be as difficult to obtain, but it can be done.  If 
a person is intent on stealing an identity, he is bound to look for what 
can be done most conveniently and be most suitable to his intents.  Just 
because the guy's a crook doesn't mean he's stupid.  A genealogical 
database where people with the same name are easily confused isn't a 
very good database, and isn't even worth having for the purposes for 
which it is intended.

In pre-internet days mother's maiden name was an easy security test, 
because it was something that most people knew about themselves and were 
unlikely to mention in ordinary conversation.  For a variety of reasons 
this test may not be as secure as it used to be.  In a sensible 
genealogical database women should conventionally be listed by their 
birth names; without such a convention it can be far more difficult to 
connect people. 

In any event if this project is going to be viable we need to start with 
the possible.  Initially, at least, a conservative privacy policy should 
be adopted with the understanding that it could be relaxed in the future 
when we have a better idea of what information is really public like BDM 
announcements in newspapers, or newspaper lists of graduation classes.

Putting that issue on the backburner that way would leave us 
concentrating on the issue of verifiability, so that we can avoid 
importing and perpetuating the sloppy research of others.  I would 
prefer that whatever we produce not be a companion piece to the Da Vinci 
Code. :-)

Ec