Abby Ohlheiser reports:
Early Tuesday morning, Anna Brittain got a text from her sister: Did she know about Familytreenow.com? The relatively unknown site, which presents itself as a free genealogy resource, seemed to know an awful lot about her.
“The site listed my 3- and 5-year-olds as ‘possible associates,’ ” Brittain, a 30-year-old young-adult fiction writer in Birmingham, Ala., told The Washington Post on Tuesday. Her sister, a social worker who works at a child advocacy center, found the site while doing a regular Internet footprint checkup on herself. “Given the danger level of my sister’s occupation,” Brittain added, the depth of information available on the genealogy site “scared me to death.”
Read more on The Washington Post.
Here are the site’s opt-out directions. I followed them, and they do seem to work, although we’ll see if the records are actually deleted within 48 hours. Do note that you must start on the optout page for the procedure to work or you won’t get to the red “DELETE” button that you’re looking for.