Date: Thu, Sep 7, 2000 1:26 PM Thank You for providing a place for me to vent my problem which effects many. I and my immediate family, as well as countless others, are having their personal information exposed to the world through commercial genealogy dot com companies. and their web sites. Once the information is gathered from solicitation to "Upload Your Family." Many uncaring individuals do just that. Information once obtained innocently from a trusting relative and then combined to form a database of personal information. This information meant only to be shared with close family members. These databases sometimes are distributed to countless numbers of people and often finding the hands of someone remotely related who posts / publishes / uploads information without permission from those living individuals who participated. Innocent as it may seem but in the hands of ruthless name collectors this can and does aide in the stealing of ones identity. One such commercial genealogy dot com states that they do not solicit information on living individuals. They claim to have filters in place to prevent the posting of Living individuals on their web site. All too often these names and information slip through the filters. If a person happens to use the sites search engine and finds their name listed along with that of their entire family. They can request that the dot com remove the objectionable file. All too happy to do so after a two to three week delay. Much time to allow just anyone to download the information and add it to their database and uploaded it again. Instead of dealing with one individual who submits files but two or more are now in on the exploitation. My situation is the abuse, harassment, and blatant refusal of two individuals to stop reloading / uploading / publishing my immediate family to a particular genealogy dot com web site. I have pleaded with their ISP's which neither have responded. After multiple e-mails to the individuals, each have answered in kind with additional files containing duplicate information to be posted on the web site. At times over the past month alone as many as ten files contain my personal information and that of my family members have been on the web page. If left alone the genealogy dot com burns the data collected into CD's and sold or packaged and sold with genealogy programs. An act which in most cases no permission having been granted by those individuals contained in the databases. A perceived notion that one is protected from such acts by the general public and ruthless commercial name collectors is a problem that will only get worse if not addressed. What next! Will our own government allow all our personal information to float in and out of the hands of anyone who seeks it? I thank you for this opportunity to expose my family's situation. Edward J. Keen |