Regarding possible conflicts: Each person that joins Geni controls his/her own privacy depending on what they are comfortable with–so if you’ve invited someone to join your Geni tree and they join then they can set their own privacy settings which will take precedent. This is for their own Profile and for those that they add. For example their Profile will be controlled by them. They can choose to make it editable or not–it’s their profile so it’s their choice.

As for deceased ‘Managed Profiles’ that you’ve added to your Geni tree (you’ll find this under ‘Settings’ and you can choose to make yourself the only person who can edit their profiles if you wish): You set the controls. If another family member joins and adds an additional deceased profile to your tree they will be the one to decide who can edit those profiles.

The customizable privacy settings that you see on Geni today evolved from customer suggestions and feedback. As with much of what we do here at Geni we listen to our users and add features and changes based on what we hear from them through emails, our forum and blogs like yours.

If you’d like to join in some lively discussions on these topics or start your own go to http://www.formum.geni.com. Members of the Geni Team visit the forum daily to see what our users are saying about our service and what their needs are. This has been a great tool in guiding the team’s direction for future enhancements.

As before I’ve given you a Geni email which you can use to communicate directly with us.

I liked the site enough to read 5 or 6 reviews and attempt an educated guess. Obviously I chose to give it a shot when I tried to upload my GEDCOM, but I’ll take advantage of the communications door you opened here and ask a few other questions to clarify things.

1) When family members sign up to add to the tree, whose privacy settings win during a conflict? In other words, if I configure my profile and the tree to be private and viewable by family only, can a family member who signs up accidentally or intentionally override the tree’s privacy settings? I’m not so worried about the intentional as I am the accidental.

2) Why are the privacy settings loose by default? I realize that the family tree mojo works best if multiple parties get involved, but the default options seem to give away more of the farm than necessary to meet that goal.

And thanks for the mention of the privacy settings options and privacy policy. I looked through both last night and was bolstered by your privacy policy, but I’m still cautious about sharing personal info for hundreds of family members. I replied to the e-mail and look forward to working out a solution for the GEDCOM upload.

~JK

I’ve given you an email address you can use to contact us so that we can check the status of your GEDCOM request and answer any specific privacy questions you have.