Genealogical Databases Getting Harder to Access

Mark Baard points to a story running at biomedcentral.com titled "Gain for science is history buffs' loss", summarizing "Privacy laws enacted by Iceland's Parliament in light of DeCode's research now apply to genealogies, restricting who can access information that was once public."

Comments

Soln Equivalence File-Sharing of Copyrighted Matl

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I've used the web to do geneological research and really was in favor of the free "rootsweb" concept when it came out.

Last I heard, though, they were struggling financially and I think they got bought up by ancestry.com, which tends to charge for access to their database if you want everything you can get. Some limited access is free.

When my relatives thought of putting up our family tree on the web, my first thought was "No way do I want anyone in the world to be able to know this much about me and my family."

When I mentioned this to my father and cousin, they agreed. Since they didn't have the know-how to setup a special SSL site, we more or less don't have an official web site and use an obscure URL.

But it's really a shame that I cannot find some way to share my geneological research with other responsible researchers that could benefit from my work to expand their own family trees - and vice versa.

This is really a good example of where you need metrics for the web of trust and a mechanism for systematically excluding more information the less you can trust someone.

However, I suspect the problem can be reduced to the same problem that applies to the distribution of copyrighted material - they wan't some control over the distribution of the information.

It would be enough for me if anyone with access posted a surety bond at PayPal - but if they re-released the information over the net, there'd be no certain way to know which of the people disclosed the information (assuming they were smart enough to munge any digital watermarks).