>You're worried about family tree data? Births, marriages, deaths, etc are all public information.

Not databased and internetted they're not. The lion's share of that data on living people (not to mention dead people) is probably only on paper, and to get pieces of it often required a written request.

Not to Godwin too hard here, but that's exactly the information that the Nazis and IBM used to detect Europeans who were descended from Jews but who didn't self-identify as Jewish.

Re: Godwin, which solution is more "brittle"?

Keeping the next fascist government from gaining control of the state, or somehow managing to keep all people and companies from retaining any extra data about you?

This isn't to say that we should allow companies to maintain extra data, but if that is your defense against the next Nazis you're screwed before you start, for the same reason that we say writing secure code in C and most C++ is a Bad Idea. It's impossible to do even for well-trained, very smart people who are trying to do the right thing.

On that note, doesn't the state already have the majority of PII on you just for tax purposes alone?

I'm not defending against the Nazis, just noting why somebody might be alarmed that their connection to every member of their family is being published on the internet.

That "lion's share" is rapidly shrinking, I think. If you're remotely related to a Mormon or someone with an affinity for ancestry.com, your birth and marriage(s) are probably databased and internetted. And soon enough, your death.

If they made the data available for free, it might be OK. But really you're just doing free work for a company who's going to lock up the data and sell it.

In the USA maybe... There are more countries in the world and that is not a common practice.