Genealogy website FamilyTreeNow knows far too much about you -- remove your details to protect your privacy

There was a craze that started a few years back for tracing one's family tree. Rather than fizzling out, the interest in genealogy continued, and there are still many websites out there that will help you to research your family history and build up a picture of the past.

While genealogists of the past may have scoured public records and libraries for information about their family, these days people want things handed to them on a plate. One website is taking full advantage of this -- as well as the fact that the internet can act as a huge database of personal information -- and there's a high chance it has vast amounts of data about you that can be accessed by anyone. The site is FamilyTreeNow.com, and we'll show you what you need to do to protect your privacy and security.

The site has understandable appeal; it seems to take just about all of the hard work out of creating a family tree. All you need to do is to provide your name and the state in which you live and the site will do its best to home in on you. (If the site's not able to pinpoint you quite so easily, it will provide you with a helpful list of suggestions). What FamilyTreeNow.com is able to reveal is your name, age, year of birth, a list of your relatives, a list of people you might be associated with, and -- most worryingly of all -- a list of your current and past addresses. Any person linked with you appears as a clickable link, and a similar raft of data is provided about them as well.

The most disturbing part of this is that the information is available not only to you, but to anyone who decides to make use of FamilyTreeNow.com. There's no need to pay a subscription, no need to even create an account -- you can just start looking up individuals' details right this second, and use that information for whatever you want. It is a potential phishing attack perpetrator's dream.

Of course, if you have a common name it may be slightly more difficult for someone to home in on you, but it is still very easy to compile a huge compendium of data about someone and the people they know with nothing more than a few keystrokes.

So what can you do?

There is an opt-out process, but it is rather long-winded, and some are reporting that it is not 100 percent successful. Still, if you are concerned about the privacy implication of FamilyTreeNow, head over to the opt-out page and follow the steps detailed on the site and repeated here:

Step 1: After you click the 'begin' button below, you will be taken to the search page. Run a search for yourself.

Step 2: After you have found yourself in the results, click on the record detail. Verify that this is yourself and not just someone else with your same name.

Step 3: After you are 100% sure this is your record, click the big red 'Opt Out' button that is on the page.

Step 4: You are done. Please allow up to 48 hours for your request to be processed. Once it's processed that record will be removed from all places on the site. Note: If you have multiple records that need to be removed, repeat steps 1-4.

Note: If you found your record via a search engine, go back to the exact record, then copy the URL from your browser address bar and submit it on our contact us page here.

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