Many people are beginning to take notice of FamilyTreeNow.com, a website designed to help people find out about their family roots, but also enables users to look up other peoples' information. Some are using the website to gather celebrity information, too.
As a result, many are scrambling to remove their information from the invasive genealogy site that boasts free access to “billions of historical records including census (1790-1940) records, birth records, death records, marriage and divorce records, living people records, and military records.”
According to Time.com, “besides your family line, the site also shows possible (and shockingly accurate) close and distant relatives, neighbors, past roommates, current and past addresses, and any other variation of your name that you may have ever used.”
For those wishing to remove their digital record from the website, here’s how to do it, as noted by Anna Brittain, a young-adult fiction writer from Birmingham, Ala., who, after it was brought to her attention that “the site listed (her) 3- and 5-year-olds,” spoke with The Washington Post:
1. Do a search of your full name.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Privacy.”
3. About a quarter of the way down the page, look for “Opt Out of Living People Records” and click on “Opt out here.”
4. Proceed with the steps given.
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