Living names visible but relationships privat
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I apologise if this has been dealt with elsewhere but I haven't been able to find it. Is there a general privacy setting which enables all living names to be visible (except where otherwise over-ridden) but that relationships are kept private?
At the moment I show the names of all living people on the principle that they should be able to find if I have information about them and then, if they can verify themselves, they can either become members and thereby view and edit information, or they can request increased privacy or even deletion of their information. However, the settings I currently use allow anonymous visitors to see both names and relationships including such things as mother's maiden name and birth dates of deceased relatives both of which are potentially key security issues.
I kind of doubt that it's possible without some special coding. After all the whole point of PGV (or any other genealogy app) is the relationships. Without the relationships you basically have a bunch of unlinked individuals. How is PGV even supposed to show that? Without relationships you can't put someone in a tree or family. I guess you could have the names in the individual list but without the relationships, or any other information like dates, how would anyone even know if the name in that list refers to them for sure? Unless your name is Seymour Zebadiah Dustruffle there's a good possibility of duplicate names. And even if there was no relationship information someone can look at the @IXXX@ and make a good guess which family the name belongs to.
Maybe an easy way you could do it would be to make even names of living persons private and then post a separate list somewhere with just names that you update from time to time. It should be easy enough to run an sql query and make a list I suppose.
I agree that it may require special coding but not that it defies the point of PGV. For dead people all is still visible. One of PGV's strengths is its comprehensive and reliable approach to privacy. But the privacy expectations of the community are changing. And our policies and implementations need to adapt in response. We could hide all information on living people including names but if we hold information on living people are they not entitled to know it? At the moment the only way we can display names in PGV has the unfortunate side effect of revealing private information. Over the last 5 years on my site I have moved from showing everything to showing living names and relationships. I hide names on request (or delete altogether) but one or two people argue rather convincingly that this is not enough.
There is another reason that I have resisted hiding the names of living people and that is that many people find my site by googling their own name. Out of 100 people 99 are inspired to provide more information. But 1 finds it alarming. I would like to continue to inspire the 99 and to respect the concerns of the 1.
Graham
<but if we hold information on living people are they not entitled to know it? >
I think you're delving into a hornets nest of individual perspective on data presention. Exactly what 'rights' are living persons entitled to? Why would my use of public records, readily available from many sources, including state public records, obituaries, school graduation and classmate records, telephone directories and more, entitle anyone to know that I have them listed on our site as a relative of a relation? We simply don't publish any living person's name to protect privacy. Most of our new contributors have Googled their Grandfathers/mothers and interpretted from the display of data that we had or didn't have a listing of their parents and/or themselves. Then, if they choose to join, they must contribute their personal information so they are listed prior to activating their account, and then complete, in short order, the balance of data on siblings, spouses, children, and parents to retain access.
Access to my work is a privilege, not a right, as far as I'm concerned. On the rare occasion that someone requests removal, we usually simply hide their existence using PGV's privacy finetuning.
While I don't object to what you seem to wish to achieve, I can't see how the relationships could be hidden and still list people unless you don't allow access to INDI or FAM records but rather only to lists, as Stew suggests with his SQL query.
-Stephen
Graham, can you explain further where you want to see names for living people? I understand your overall request (not to say I necessarily agree with it, but thats not the point here), but when you say "a setting which enables all living names to be visible ... but that relationships are kept private? " I get a little confused. Names are displayed in many places, but most of them would by their position alone indicate a relationship: names listed among a table of children on the family page, a husband next to a wife, etc etc.
I wonder whether your needs can be satisfied in other, less complex ways. Perhaps along the lines stew has suggested - a new listing option that over-rules the 'normal' privacy settings perhaps? I suspect that would be fairly easy to implement.
I would envisage that searching for Graham Maxwell Shepherd would find my individual page with my name and ID on it, no relatives or trees, and "This information is private and visible only to verified family members."
Searching for Shepherd would find the individual list page starting with S, including all Shepherds.
A person looking for himself, even with a common name, could explore deceased individuals and families and quickly establish whether or not he was on the site.
Thanks Graham - now I understand better. Definitely not currently possible, and as you are already seeing, a highly debatable issue. You will need to raise a Feature Request for it, although given its controversial nature you will be relying on finding a developer, or someone with programming skills that shares your approach. Its certainly achievable, and probably not very difficult seeing as most of the complexity in PGV is designed to do the exact opposite. Removing much of PGV's privacy protection in this (albeit limited) way, would be far simpler code.
I'll have to agree with Stephen.
If they're interested in genealogy, they'll join when they find an ancestor on the site. If they only find you by searching for their own full name, they're not really interested in genealogy, and anything they tell you about an ancestor is probably family legend, i.e., similar to "urban legend."
For your feature request, would the WorldConnect approach be a compromise for you?
They will show families, descendant charts, etc. with "LIVING" in place of the name of those people, and all other details suppressed. So if a husband is deceased, you might see that he is married to LIVING and has children named LIVING, LIVING, and LIVING
:-)
At one time, they allowed the DB owner to decide whether names would be displayed and suppressed all other info. But enough people pressured them to change that.