The Next Big (Church) Thing.........in genealogy

Discussions around Genealogy technology.
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huffkw
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Privacy

#11

Post by huffkw »

jbh001:

I want to assure you that your concerns about privacy are not any reason to fear or resist the good that such a system could do. Every reasonable concern about privacy can be easily handled by the technology.

I am a lawyer and a computer consultant, and I have spent some time on the topic, and as far as I know, there are no general laws in the US governing such situations. It is all a matter of preference, prudence, and being respectful. In a few cases there may be specific private contracts that need to be observed. You can find any number of genealogy websites that contain data about the living, and I don’t know of any legal trouble anyone has had on that point. And how about the new phenomenon of YouTube, Facebook, etc., etc., where the living flaunt their existence and information? I think it is interesting that the US government publishes data about deceased persons almost as soon as they die, so the government is not too concerned about such matters. And our social security numbers are used everywhere by nearly everybody. Privacy is honored only in the breach, as the saying goes.

The privacy issue seems always to be big in genealogy circles, and I guess that makes sense since people and identities are at the heart of the process. It is a good idea to bring it up here.

However, I think there is sometimes an unreasonable level of concern, which I don’t completely understand. Maybe some people have mixed together two quite different things. They might legitimately worry about exposing themselves and others to some kind of improper knowledge and treatment by the public. But I wonder if they also mix in some concerns about ownership and copyright issues. They may feel a pride in their work and want to be recognized and perhaps paid for their strenuous efforts, and feel cheated if people just grab their stuff and do unpredictable things with it. I think the two legitimate issues of privacy and copyright/ownership can be dealt with quite separately.

It would be easy to add security logic to a large database system such as I propose, so that any user who enters data could have complete privacy (and complete ownership), sharing none of his or her work with anyone but themselves, as with a home PAF file, or they might choose to share it online with specific members of their extended family, or they could choose to make some or all of it visible to the public, with constraints against any outsider seeing anyone who is living, for example. They might even elect to charge people to view their data, if they wish.

So in the ways just mentioned, what is seen by the public would be more under the personal control of the data contributor than it is in nFS. With its main focus being on temple work, the nFS is set up as a communal database where any descendent of a specific person can see, change, and add anything about that common ancestor, even if that conflicts with the desires of their many distant cousins who also have that same access to see and modify that common ancestor. For example, ten generations back, a user could have “view and change” access to people with 1,024 different surnames. That means an uninformed and undisciplined person could do a lot of damage, if they chose to. There may be literally millions of descendents of the 1,024 ancestral families who could have their ancestral data messed with. But, of course, users with that access could also do a lot of good that could benefit millions of others by making the right connections and clearing up data errors, and especially, making sure their temple work was done correctly.

I think the nFS has done what it can within its communal data structure to limit access to the proper people who have the right interests, and hopefully, the right data. But, one might still worry that there may still be too much general access for users, who might introduce errors by mistake. It may be fine for concerned and diligent members, but inviting in millions of outsiders, who don’t share our concern about the proper recording of temple work, could open up the system to a host of problems (which could all be guarded against in the system I propose).

Within the new system I suggest, it would be easy to allow people to put in any data they wished, perhaps with a different interpretation of an historical record, and anyone with proper access could see it, but it would not change any data anyone else had put in. That compartmentalization of original data, and any changes to it, might also be considered a security improvement over nFS. Connections could be made between the data entered by different people so that a complete interconnected whole could achieved, but, again, even these connections would not change anyone’s data. Those connections would be another layer of data, stored in a separate place.

I could fix my daughter’s marriage data by logging on as her, and I am sure she and her husband would appreciate my taking care of that for them, but there is something a little strange about having to have a whole list of family logons just to do some ordinary data maintenance for the family. That is not a constraint that would make sense to the generic genealogist wishing to add their data to the whole. For example, they might wish to put in the genealogical history for the entire population of a small German village. (I know one lady who does this sort of thing.) They could not do that at all under current nFS rules. They could only see and modify the one or two people they were directly connected to as a descendent, and I presume they would have to carefully build up their pedigree lines before they could enter those people at all.

I meant to use my daughter’s marriage as an example of constraints that make some sense within the nFS system, which is especially concerned with sealings and other ordinances, but those constraints would have very little to do with real privacy concerns in a more generic system. Those constraints would simply make the system almost unusable as a means for collecting a large amount of high quality, lineage-linked data from many industrious participants.
jbh001
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#12

Post by jbh001 »

huffkw wrote:I want to assure you that your concerns about privacy are not any reason to fear or resist the good that such a system could do.
Unfortunately it is not me you need to assure. It is Congress and those that would lobby against such a database.

For example, a family history organization I know of published a book back in the 1950s or 1960s about a certain ancestor and his descendants. Included was birth, death, and marriage information on many living individuals. When that family history organization went to print an updated second edition, the privacy laws that have been exacted since the first edition prevented them from adding information on ANY new descendants. And had those same laws been in effect at the time of the first edition, no information on those living at that time would have been legal to publish (at least not without a written release from every single one of them).
huffkw wrote:You can find any number of genealogy websites that contain data about the living, and I don’t know of any legal trouble anyone has had on that point.
In today's privacy climate, I call that dumb luck.
huffkw wrote:And how about the new phenomenon of YouTube, Facebook, etc., etc., where the living flaunt their existence and information? I think it is interesting that the US government publishes data about deceased persons almost as soon as they die, so the government is not too concerned about such matters.
These are poor examples. It is one thing for me to publish and make my own information available to the general public. It is an entirely different matter for someone else to post that information without my consent or knowledge.

Additionally, once a person is dead, privacy is no longer much of an issue. Even there, it does not trigger an automatic release of all information regarding that individual. For example, the spouse listed on a marriage license may still be alive. Parents listed on a birth certificate might also still be alive.

As a lawyer your statements don't come across someone who is familiar with the ins and outs of all the privacy legislation and regulation relevant to your proposal.
huffkw wrote: The privacy issue seems always to be big in genealogy circles, and I guess that makes sense since people and identities are at the heart of the process. It is a good idea to bring it up here.

However, I think there is sometimes an unreasonable level of concern, which I don’t completely understand.
Privacy issues are the most significant stumbling block your proposal faces. They overshadow the combined effect of any other stumbling block it may face. There is a reason that U.S. census records are searchable only up through 1930, and it's not a technical or manpower issue.
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#13

Post by rmrichesjr »

Perhaps I'm missing something, but what in the original proposal by huffkw requires any information about living people? Couldn't the project be done, and most of the benefit from it gained, by working only with dead people, or information old enough to be reasonably confident that the people described in the records are now deceased? What am I missing about the original proposal that requires information about living people?
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huffkw
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More on privacy

#14

Post by huffkw »

jbh001:

Hmmm. If you see things that way, then many others probably do also. So I will have to dig a lot deeper to find and present the complete “ground truth” on this complicated point, including following up your Google search results. I have done some privacy research about Europe, but they see things quite differently there.

Usually these privacy laws are directed at governments (might the census records be one such case?), but I cannot say unequivocally right now that the behavior of individuals is not covered in any way.

So let us assume for the moment that everything you say is correct.
What if I said the new system would not be allowed to contain data on living people at all, but only the 300 million deceased Americans?
Would there still be a serious objection to setting up such a system?

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(I have already mentioned that in the system I envision, the living could be in there, if the users chose to enter them, but those living would not be visible to anyone except named family members. I thought that should be good enough for everyone, but I need to be sure. Maybe we are simply dealing here with a lack of confidence that the system can actually maintain privacy for the living, regardless of the elaborate controls embedded in it.)
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I have friends publishing (formally and informally) family books all the time, many with complete basic data on living individuals. No one has had a problem with that, that I know of. They get sold, distributed widely, donated to BYU library, etc. Is there a way I could check the case you mentioned to see the circumstances, and maybe see if there was anything unusual about that case?
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I would like to deal with all objections to such a database, and see if there might be a way to resolve those objections and move ahead. The current ways we have to do research are so inefficient that, as a lifetime computer professional working on very large systems (many, many times larger than the one I suggest for genealogy), I just cringe every time I feel I have to spend much time doing research.

If the objections come down to just resisting change from the old ways, or maybe a fear that some genealogy professionals will be affected economically, temporarily, then I will not be too sympathetic. It is time to move on, I believe.
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aebrown
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#15

Post by aebrown »

huffkw wrote:I hope the choice will be made to put what is being called Record Search into a new framework which will be optimized for nationwide use

Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't the entire premise of this thread dependent on the assumption that all the source records needed for this project are already digitized and indexed? Otherwise the time assumptions given in the opening post on this thread are off by a significant factor.

I don't know what percentage of the needed records are available online, but I'm guessing it's far less than half. The Church is diligently working at digitizing records, and the FamilySearch Indexing project is indexing many records, but there is still a lot of work to do, just in making the records available.

To my mind, it makes a lot of sense to separate the projects, which is what the Church has done. Digitizing is one project, that requires access to records and equipment to scan images. Indexing is another, and the FamilySearch Indexing model is a great innovation in this area. Identifying linkages is another project. This will of course still be plagued by ambiguity -- especially older records have inaccuracies and omissions that make it difficult to decide if you've really got the right John Brown (a very real problem in my ancestry).

In any case, the project envisioned in this thread sounds great for that third project, but it depends very much on the first two.
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huffkw
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#16

Post by huffkw »

Alan_Brown wrote: In any case, the project envisioned in this thread sounds great for that third project, but it depends very much on the first two.
I would be perfectly happy if that is how it comes out. I mostly wanted to get my two-cents-worth in before plans and commitments are made concerning that third project. The little bit of speculation I have heard about future plans did not sound all that well thought out, so I hoped my plug for a new kind of cooperation and efficiency might get a hearing. I have spent a lot of time on this topic, looking at it from several different angles in an academic way, and maybe my experiences could be useful to others.

The main thing I think is missing is a general goal and commitment in the genealogy community to create a lineage-linked central database such as I have suggested. I’m sure the resources exist if enough people had the will. Without that goal and the will to do it, even completing the digitizing and indexing would not be enough to make it happen. We would probably still be left with PAF files on home computers, in much the same way and on much the same scale as we have now. We should remember that much of this source record data is already available from other online sources, much of it indexed, so the biggest single change coming from Church involvement might be simply making it free (although I assume the range of data will eventually exceed what is already available).
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I want to add some other viewpoints to what you have said.

I believe there are about 100 million digitized images available at this point. I don’t know how many are indexed, but one person thought that about 300,000 images were being completed each week. (Double-entered, that would be about 600,000 images). At that rate, for 50 weeks, that would be 15 million completed a year. That is a big number, but it still might take 133 years at that rate to do the full 2 billion images. I am an impatient guy, so I am looking for a place to push on the gas pedal.

If it takes 40 minutes per image, that means people are spending about (40 * 600,000/60 = ) 400,000 hours a week on the indexing project. At 4 hours each a week, that would mean 100,000 people are active in the project.

If more people were excited about the project, because the goal was very much in sight, instead of appearing to be more than 100 years off, then we might have 1,000,000 a week contributing or even 10 million a week contributing. (Aren’t there about 1 million people on the old FamilySearch site every day? More of them might want to help if the incentives/enticements were right.)

It would be a positive spiral – the more who are willing to work, the more who would be willing to work. If there were 100 times as many people involved, at 10 million, or the equivalent number of hours, it would only take about one year to index it all – at that speed it might far outpace the digitizing process.
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But we might consider that there are other ways to get the same result. People can still do data entry directly from microfilm, for example, as they have done in the past, and they could then more easily choose which film they want to work on, which presumably would contain data of direct interest to them. That would again raise the immediacy of the payoff to the workers, and encourage them to specialize, and any digitizing bottleneck could be avoided. They might very well choose to go the next step and lineage-link everyone in the records they are dealing with.

This individualized process could cover all three steps at once -- accessing the microfilm, indexing or data conversion, and linking of names.

If the grand goal was in sight, and the software was available to support it, many people might find numerous ways to contribute without waiting for all the Church’s industrial processes to happen in sequence, possibly over a very long period. I was told that large sections of the Church’s microfilm are off limits to indexing (and perhaps digitizing?) because of prior contractual agreements. It may be that individuals would not be constrained by those contracts, if they have other sources of data.

I would like to see the cooperative system in place soon, if for no other reason than to “fire up the base,” as they say in politics, by showing them that the goal is real and its accomplishment can be near at hand. They would not have to wait for their grandchildren to finish the task.

We might also note that this is a one-time task. Once the old public records from the beginning of our nation (and Europe) are done, no one should again have to go back to them. Most future data sources may be available almost immediately, or at least would not go back more than about 80 years. This endless combing of ancient records by so many people could finally mostly cease. (People might still wish to see them, but it would be more like a museum visit than active genealogical research.)
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Once again we move to the "Two databases" idea

#17

Post by BradJackman-p40 »

Seems like most of these forum topics, and many blogs, are suggesting a new database, one not built on the nFS data set. Many of the current problems being discussed about the data, research, sourcing, documentation, and living individual information issues in nFS would be resolved if a NEW database of RESEARCH was created, and we didn't dump in all the past info from Ancestral File, Pedigree Resource File, Membership Records, and the IGI.

There seems to be no opposition (but many proponents) to the 2 (or more) databases idea. Is anyone at FamilySearch listening? I hope so, but they seem so dead set on doing it THEIR way, and haven't addressed many of the major concerns presented so far. I'm losing faith in their ability to listen to new ideas.
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#18

Post by russellhltn »

BradJackman wrote:NEW database of RESEARCH was created, and we didn't dump in all the past info from [...] the IGI.

Except the IGI is strikes at the whole purpose of the church's involvement in Genealogy. It has to be there in some way, shape or form.

I think things will change once Record Search is grafted into nFS. The existing web of AF and PAF will act like a mesh in skin grafting - a framework to speed the work of attaching source-based information.
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