[CET] Privacy Settings

[CET] Trees support the ability for owners to designate a tree as public or private. Most owners will likely choose to make their tree public. Trees uploaded by applications should be set as public by default and allow users to change it to private if desired.

Public Tree Setting

Making a tree public enables it to be discoverable by other users on FamilySearch.org. Only information that represents deceased, non-sensitive persons will be made public. Data in public trees can be found from the Search endpoint.

Private Tree Setting

In private trees, all persons, relationships, etc. are viewable only to members of the group. Private information is not included in the tree search indexes, so persons in private trees cannot be found from the Search endpoint.

Privacy Expiration

The privacy setting for private trees is not permanent . The private setting will expire if a tree becomes inactive for more than 2 years. A tree is considered active if either of the following conditions are met:

• The owner logs into FamilySearch.org. Each time the owner logs in, it resets the privacy expiration term.
• A contributor makes an edit. Each time a contributor makes an edit to the tree, it extends the privacy expiration term for another two years.

When the privacy expires, FamilySearch will contact the owner of the tree and give a 30-day grace period to log in. If no action is taken, the tree will become public and information about the deceased, non-sensitive persons will become public.

User Requirement for Private Setting

Users must be made aware of privacy expiration if they designate a tree as private from within a third-party application. The user must acknowledge and agree to the following terms when setting a [CET] tree to private:

If you, as the owner of this tree, do not sign in to your FamilySearch account for two years and if your invited contributors make no edits to this tree during that same time, FamilySearch will attempt to contact you by email. After 30 days, the privacy setting automatically changes to public.

Users should also be made aware of the following:

Note: If you change your tree from public to private, it may take a day for the data to be removed from search results.

Technical Implementation

By default, when a tree is created, the tree will be marked as private=true. The tree should remain in this state until the tree has been initialized, and the tree data has been populated. For more information, see the section “Finalizing the Tree Upload” in the guide Uploading a Tree to [CET].