Ancestry Terms Update

Recently, Ancestry announced changes to its terms and conditions for users, and they are changes every user needs to take in and consider.  As of this change, effective 3 August 2021, any content uploaded to Ancestry by its subscribers, Ancestry can use as it sees fit, forever.

Part of Ancestry's terms and conditions no read as follows :

"By submitting User Provided Content through any of the Services, you grant Ancestry a perpetual, sublicensable, worldwide, non-revocable, 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 deem 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."  (“Ownership of Your Content” in “Ancestry Terms and Conditions,” effective 3 Aug 2021, Ancestry.com)

What this means it that any content you upload into Ancestry - photos, documents, stories, etc - in essence now belong to Ancestry, forever.  They can use that content in any way they see fit, and there is no way for you to permanently remove it from their database.

Over the years that I have been a subscriber to Ancestry I have posted a number of photographs and other documents into my family tree.  I have always understood that others could copy those documents, download them, save them to their own family trees, and that even if I deleted that content from my own tree it could remain linked to other trees eternally.  I have always understood that by uploading that content, in some ways I would lose control of it forever.  According to these new terms, however, I lose even more control of any uploaded content to Ancestry itself.  I'm not sure how comfortable I feel about that.

For more information, read the truly excellent blog posts by Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist 'One Big Change at Ancestry' about these new changes, and also her follow-up post 'Ancestry Retreats' about the subsequent addition to the new terms.