Have you invaded the privacy of your living relatives by passing along genealogical data about them to someone else without their expressed written permission? You may have if you have shared your genealogical databases or research notes with a third party. While the dead do not have a right to privacy, the living certainly do.

Is personal information about you, your children and living relatives posted on a web page where any crook or kook can find it? If may be if you have shared your genealogical data via GEDCOM, pedigree charts or family group sheets with others. Use any search engine and look for your names. Be sure to check GenDex (http://www.gendex.com/) as well as visit some of the commercial websites who encourage software owners of their products to contribute their GEDCOMS.

What you find may surprise you. One genealogist found her entire working database posted -- errors and all -- on another's website. The material had been passed along via a cousin of a cousin, without her knowledge or consent.

Genealogists are sharing, caring people, and most of us think nothing of handing over all of our genealogical data to distant cousins, even strangers. However, we should start thinking about the ramifications of our actions.

The idea of sharing genealogical information is good, and technology has made it easy. However, technology is not an exclusive tool for honest people. If detailed personal information about you and your living relatives is on the Internet, crooks can and do find it, and some scam artist may use it to hoodwink your grandmother into giving out the secrets that will open her bank account. It has happened.

Remember your living relatives have the same rights to privacy that you do, and among these rights are:

-- The right to be free of unreasonable and highly offensive intrusions into one's seclusion, including the right to be free of highly objectionable disclosure of private information in which the public has no legitimate interest;

-- Appropriation of one's name or likeness by another without consent; and

-- False light in the public eye -- the right to avoid false attributions of authorship or association.

Publishing genealogical information about a living person without their consent -- putting it on a GEDCOM, chart or the web -- may involve any or all three aspects of their right to privacy. They may be able to seek legal relief through a civil lawsuit.

What can you do?

-- If you find someone has posted information about you or living relatives on the Internet, ask them to take it down. Be as forceful as is necessary.

-- If you are a webmaster, do not put others' genealogical data on your site without their written permission, and never include information about living persons.

-- Exclude information about any living persons from your GEDCOMS and charts before sharing them with anyone. Most genealogy software will allow you to exclude all persons born after a particular date, which you can pick such as 1920, 1910 or 1900, for example. Or use a handy freeware utility program called GEDClean that is available for downloading at: (http://www.raynorshyn.com/gedclean/).

-- Educate yourself about privacy issues on the Internet: http://www.onlinegenealogy.
com/aug96/aug96.html

Share your genealogical data on ancestors. However, do not intrude on the privacy of your living relatives, and do not allow them to violate yours.

(c) 1997, Los Angeles Times Syndicate