Ancestry Makes its Terms and Conditions Clearer

Ancestry is committed to ensuring their customers understand the policies that govern the use of their products and services. On Aug. 3, they updated their Terms and Conditions. Ancestry heard back from you that they needed to be more clear about how they manage user provided content.

Ancestry appreciates your feedback and have added new, clarifying language to the license section (2.2.3) – highlighted below – that they hope will help.

…by submitting User Provided Content through any of the Services, you grant Ancestry a perpetual, sublicensable, worldwide, non-revokable, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, publish, distribute, provide access to, create derivative works of, and otherwise use such User Provided Content to the extent and in the form or context we deal appropriate on or through any media or medium and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed or discovered.

This includes the right for Ancestry to copy, display, and index your User Provided Content. Ancestry will own the indexes it creates. Notwithstanding the non-revokable and perpetual nature of this license, it terminates when your User Provided Content is deleted from our systems. Be aware that to the extent you make your User Provided Content “public” and other users copied or saved it to the Services, this license continues until the content has been deleted by both you and the other users.

When a user chooses to delete their tree or other content they have contributed, it is removed. However, this clarification to the Terms and Conditions enables Ancestry to allow other users to keep a copy of the previously shared user provided content in their own family trees, even after the original contributor has made their tree private or deleted their content.

This change to the Ancestry Terms and Conditions is consistent with the manner in which other genealogy research platforms handle user provided content. It was never intended to enable Ancestry to do anything with our users’ content other than facilitate a vibrant family history community that brings the value of personal discoveries to all.

Related Articles on FamilyTree.com:

Ancestry Launches Community Impact Program

Ancestry Updated Communities for Members with Ties to Germanic Europe

Ancestry Updated its Family History App

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