Does This Genealogy Site Sell Your Information?

A newsletter reader posed a question this week:

The small historical society I belong to received the following email. Do you know anything about this group? I don't want to see us get hit by one of the genealogy scams.

In fact, I didn't know anything about the site at www.FamilyTrackers.com, so I decided to investigate.

Here is the text of email that the reader received, complete with the original spelling errors left in:

I just visited your website and believe that your society and members would be interested in Family Trackers World Genealaogy Exchange located at.... (FamilyTrackers.com)

You can promote your society's services on the site, publish small lookups or large projects to a world-wide audience. You always continue to own your copyrights to published materials and set your own prices (or distribute for free). You can even recruite and organize indexers and transcribers on Family Trackers. All society services are free at Family Trackers.

Family Trackers automatically matches genealogists' searches with current and future publications, distant relatives, genealogy societies, professional genealogists, and discussion groups. Our family tree application is one of the best tracking tools online.

Membership, searching and publishing are free on Family Trackers.

Thank you.

Gene Hall
CEO
Family Trackers, Inc.
1075-239 Space Park Way
Mountain View, CA 94043

Indeed, that seems innocent enough, even with the spelling errors. I've been known to make a few spelling errors myself, so I won't judge that too harshly. However, you'd think that anyone running a genealogy site would know how to spell the word, instead of writing it as "Genealaogy."

A quick check of the site at http://www.familytrackers.com doesn't turn up anything too unusual. In fact, it appears to be a bona fide genealogy-related site.

A quick check of the owner's other business activities shows something suspicious, however.

The same Mr. Gene Hall at the same address in Mountain View is also listed as the owner of Hall Market Research, as well as the owner of Market Profiles at www.MarketProfiles.net. According to that web site's main page:

Market Profiles is a full-service research company that surveys members of our online panel about the web sites that they visit and sells the results to web site marketers through affiliates and directly through our online store.

In other words, a genealogist receives unsolicited mail from Family Trackers, believes it, signs up, and "even recruits and organizes indexers and transcribers on Family Trackers." All of these folks then have their information collected by surveys, and that information is then sold to other marketers.

To my knowledge, there is nothing illegal about this. Hundreds of companies do the same every day. However, the fact that Mr. Hall conceals his real intentions in the unsolicited e-mail message sent to genealogists certainly raises a few questions. The Family Trackers web site also never mentions the selling of information derived from users. That bothers me.

You can check this out for yourself at http://familytrackers.com and at http://marketprofiles.net.

Is this a problem? What do you think?

Comments

[Mark Roy]

According to the site's Privacy Policy, they do not rent or sell information to other parties. Just because the owners also own a marketing business, I would not automatically assume they will sell personal information. It's certainly not a charge I'd make without evidence and without a response from the site owners.

It looks like the site wants to be a marketplace for buying and selling bits of genealogical information. It's an intriguing idea. Until now, most individuals share information and provide services (e.g. lookups) for free to fellow genealogists. With profit as an incentive, perhaps individuals would be interested in providing more services (e.g. I'll do obit lookups in my local paper's archives for $5 each).

If this site provides a central point to offer and use these services (and collect a percentage of sales), I think they have a clever idea. Apparently, they will host other information to try to draw traffic. I don't know if it will be successful or not, but I don't have a problem with it.

[David Staub]

I agree with Mark Roy. At least on its face, this seems like a legitimate business model that appears to be separate from the survey business. In fact, given that the survey business appears to conduct actual online consumer surveys, it is hard to see how the information passively gathered here would even be that helpful to the other business.

[GeneHall]

Hi,

Please allow me to clarify. I am the owner of FamilyTrackers, Inc. and 'genealogy' was spelled correctly in my original email. The email has been re-entered by someone else - don't think that I could misspell the name of my own company that many times in one email. :)

I do have a survey business that does a handful of custom research projects each year. Members of my panel sign up voluntarily for this activity and I use a double opt-in system so that no one is ever spammed. That business is separate from FamilyTrackers and complies fully with all spam laws. The information collected from these surveys is presented to my clients in aggregate form and never reveals the identity of anyone on the panel.

FamilyTrackers is a world-wide genealogy exchange that matches genealogists with societies, professionals, public data, and other genealogists with similar interests. I never share information about FamilyTrackers members with anyone. The original email was sent to the society by me personally (by clicking on the email link that they provided on their web site for this purpose). They were not added to any list and I have no plans to contact them again.

I hope that you will reconsider the 'conceals his real intentions . . .' comment. If I wanted to conceal something, I wouldn't have given out my address and phone number.

Thank you for letting me respond. We are trying to provide a valuable service and welcome constructive feedback.

Gene Hall, CEO
FamilyTrackers, Inc.