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Site Policy

You are encourage to read the Privacy Policy and related information on the About Us pages.

In general, any information you learn about fellow testers, researchers, or their relatives cannot be disclosed outside this group and its members. If it is not public knowledge or available through some other source than as a member of this study, then you cannot disclose it. If the user gives you permission to disclose the information even though you learned it while in this study, then it is within their prerogative to release their own information to you for disclosure.

Information that is deemed private to the group and its members are items like the FamilyTreeDNA Kit ID's, tester's names, tester's genealogy back to your common ancestor with that tester, any information about any living people or testers that is not readily available, and similar. Basically anything that is not visible to the general public that is not a member nor logged in to any site for the project.

Use common sense. For example, if you would not want information about your minor children disclosed if learned in this study, then do not do the same with someone else's similar information you discover.

While many projects on FamilyTreeDNA are pretty open with disclosing information such as Kit ID's, EKA, names and actual DNA Test results; our project is not so open. Many in the project wish to maintain privacy to some degree and are only joining to share in joint research and ideas.

Obviously, if you learn about and push back your genealogy research further back in time than a common ancestor with others, then that information is deemed your common discovery. It can be disclosed. It will often be on the public / anonymous wiki pages already.

If you learned the information through a public disclosure that was caused by someone else's negligence, fault or violation of this policy, then use common sense to still apply the policy. Just because someone else was hacked does not mean you need to pile on their misfortune.

This especially applies to WikiTree which purposely has very open information and ideas. Posting any DNA results, kit ID's or ancestral information of living people and their lines is a violation of this study as well as FamilyTreeDNA's privacy policy. Do not do it. Even if you do not post their name, line and DNA results; you cannot post the DNA result learned (that could be presumed to apply to your common ancestor) in your tree for intended propagation to ancestors earlier in time. Posting the information there but making it visible to logged in members of that other site is still considered copying and posting of private information.