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

[Benjamin Webb]

What do you think of the idea of limiting information to the names of living
people? If our database of people was large enough, then there will be quite
a few people with the same names, but they are actually different people. If
we do not publish extra information, such as date/place of birth etc, it
would be impossible to find the right person, so the inclusion of his
mothers maiden name will not pose such serious concerns.

On 01/04/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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