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  2. Your Findmypast account
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Is my Findmypast account private?

Your privacy is paramount to us. As such, we comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Regulation (EU)2016/679) is a regulation by which the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission strengthens and unifies data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU).

The GDPR was created to protect your privacy and give you more control over your personal data.

We are dedicated to looking after your personal information in a way you feel is 100% safe and secure, handling it in a responsible manner and complying with data protection laws.

Both our privacy policy and cookie policy are in line with GDPR.

We have also made sure that all of our data partners are compliant with the regulation. We have set up a number of measures to ensure your privacy rights are protected.

Information Findmypast holds about you

When you sign up on our website or place an order, we collect your name and email address. This allows us to process your registration, fulfil your order and send you important service messages.

Sometimes we may ask you to provide other contact details, such as phone number or address, to carry out our surveys. You will always be given the option to withhold these contact details at the time you complete the survey.

We do collect some information from cookies, pixels and similar software, which allows us to understand how you arrive on our websites, how you use and navigate around them, and how you interact with our email. This information is used to improve our services and communication. We obtain some information from Google Analytics and Facebook. The Facebook information provided is limited to your email address and only that which you have previously agreed with Facebook that they can share.

The information you provide to us

If you create a family tree or create content on the website, we also collect information, which may include personal information about you and other people (for example, names and birthdays of people in your family). You must ensure if you provide personal information about living people in your family, that you have the consent from the relevant individual to include that personal information on the website.

We do not collect sensitive information (also known as special categories of information) about you except when you specifically knowingly provide it and have consented to this. For example, adding your religious beliefs to a family tree.

Deleting your information

You cannot delete your Findmypast account on your own. Please email [email protected] if you wish to completely delete your account.

On confirmation of deletion of the account, no details can be recovered.

Access Request

Under the GDPR you have the Right to Access. This allows you to ask us for the data we hold about you.

If you wish to request a subject access request please email [email protected] from the email address registered to your account on Findmypast. 

GDPR and your family history research

The GDPR does not cover records related to deceased individuals, therefore, most of our historical records are not affected by the regulation.

The records we do hold about living individuals have come to our site through partnerships with public institutions and are legally open to the public.

If you have a family tree on Findmypast, there is no GDPR requirement to update it to remove living individuals. If you choose to share your family tree and it contains living individuals, you should have prior consent from them. You can read more about family tree privacy and sharing settings here.

More information about GDPR

If you have any further questions related to your personal data, please contact [email protected]. You can also contact Findmypast's data protection officer at [email protected].

More information can be found on the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) website. The ICO is the UK's independent authority set up to uphold information rights and data privacy for individuals.

 

 

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