The Ancestry and Classmates folly or your's?

eCommerce has been hoisted as the most influential economic phenomena known to man. When you think of this association, names like eBay or Amazon come to mind in a near ornate fashion. eCommerce has introduced some of the most creative means to garner revenue across the broad network of consumers offered by the world wide web. It saves a lot of time, a lot of money, and it enables some businesses to compete without much overhead cost at all. Although, there are a few bad apples in the bunch. Some internet sites benefit immensely from the unwitting efforts of users that are pilfered for the sake of profit.

Websites like Ancestry and Classmates rely entirely on a volunteer user database in order to profit. They reel you in with the idea that you may be reconnected with an old friend or that you may learn something you did not know about your family history. What they do not make clear to the user is, that as soon as you sign up and participate in their scheme, your information (email, name, location, and a slew of very personal information) becomes their product to sell to anyone willing to pay for it. Their privacy policies may include provisions restricting the transfer of a user's information to third-party marketers, but the entire premise of their business model relies on other users requesting your information and thus the other users pay a subscription fee in order to get your information. Albeit, this activity may never result in a negative experience for the user but at the same time, the user is never compensated for providing the information that is essential to these companies interests.

Is it truly legal for these entities to basically sell the personal information of its users, garnering revenues of nearly $400 million between the two in 2008? Is it a respectable practice to gather information about a non-user's family or ancestry in order to sell that information to anyone who pays for it? Because, even if you are not a member of the Ancestry website they blatantly advertise that your family history is there to be reviewed by anyone who pays for it. Even if you never subscribe to Classmates, merely signing up out of curiosity puts you into their database and then your information is used to entice others' to subscribe so that they may contact you.

These two websites are similar but also different. Classmates seemingly withdraws it's liability since the user volunteered the information. Ancestry simply uses public records or information provided by paid and non-paid users to compile a wealth of information that a non-user has no choice but to allow them to sell. Could that really be true?

Both sites use photographs as selling points. Classmates relies on the user to upload the photos, while Ancestry will obtain this graphic information any way it can (public record, google photos, yearbooks, news archives, etc).

It is astonishing how these companies have been able to benefit from the ill-thought decisions of it's users. In the wake of such media fervor over Facebook's use (or free trade) of personal information, why hasn't there been more talk about how Classmates and Ancestry make their millions. Perhaps it is all just the user's fault for not using elementary logic before typing in their personal information.


Mr. Polysyllabic