Privacy Statement

Privacy Information for Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com Operations Inc., (and referred to as 'Ancestry.com' 'Ancestry' 'we' 'us' 'our'), operator of this Website, recognizes the confidentiality of information that may be disclosed by members in registering or making purchases from our Website and we are committed to protecting your privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for this Website.

The specifics of our use of personal information are best described in the answers to the following Frequently Asked Questions:

Do you ask for personal information from your members?
Yes.We ask for your name, e-mail address, and other limited personal informationwhen you sign up as a member, when you use features such as e-mail, and whenyou make purchases from us. We may ask for similar information at other times,such as when you enter sweepstakes or other promotions sponsored by us and/orone of our partners. To facilitate payment and fulfillment in connection withmembership and other purchases from us, we will request personal credit card,debit card or other payment information.

As a member of Ancestry.com, you can also chose to share further information about yourself, your activity on the site, and your background and interests, with other members of the site. The type and quantity of profile information you share in this way is entirely your choice. Information about some of your activity on the site, such as historical records you save, may also be shared with other members in order to help you connect with others researching similar ancestors. See "Member Profiles" below for more information on how to edit and control what you allow other members to see about you and your site activity in your public profile or other places on the site.

How do you use my personal information?
The primary use of your personal information, other than directly in connection with a purchase, is to efficiently provide you with personalized, relevant information.

We will also use registration information to let you know about new features or other offers of interest from us and to address customer service needs and requests.

In distributing advertiser or sponsor messages, the advertiser is not given access to individual account information. We do not sell, rent or otherwise distribute the personal information you provide us to these advertisers for their use. Advertisers simply provide the advertising message and we then display the ad to appropriate users.

Will you disclose any of my personal information to third parties?
We will not disclose your personal information provided in connection with membership registration or purchases, except as described in this Privacy Statement or as may be required by law, or to protect our rights or property.

Information submitted by you online (such as information about products you purchase from us, your name, address, e-mail address) may be shared with companies with which we have a commercial relationship and through which you reached Ancestry.com, for marketing purposes. For example, if you make a purchase with us because of a special offer made through another Website acting as a distributor of our products, in that circumstance you will be considered their customer as well. We will not, except as may be required by law, share with any other party your password or payment information.

Other circumstances where limited personal information may be disclosed are specifically described when the data is collected, or in the rules of sweepstakes or other promotions.

We do reserve the right to disclose aggregated user statistics, such as "45 percent of our users are female" or "10,000 members indicate an interest in gardening" in order to describe our services to prospective partners, advertisers, and other third parties.

Under protection of confidentiality agreements, we use third party processors in some cases to help us provide services and manage our Websites and relationships with you. These may include purchase and order fulfillment, credit card processing, removing duplicate information from lists, providing marketing assistance and providing other customer services. Third-party processors and providers will be given access only to that information needed to perform their support functions, and are prohibited from using it for other purposes.

As our business continues to grow, we might buy or sell subsidiaries or business units. In these transactions, customer information is often one of the transferred assets, remaining subject to promises made in existing privacy statements. Also, in the event that Ancestry, or substantially all of its assets are acquired, customer information will, as a matter of course, be one of the transferred assets.

What about purchases from advertisers or other linked Websites?
If you click away from Ancestry.com to visit the Website of any third party advertiser or sponsor, you may be asked for your credit card or other personal information in order to purchase or use products and services offered. These companies have their own privacy and data collection practices. We have no responsibility or liability for these independent policies. You should therefore review their privacy policies carefully if you have concerns about how your information may be used.

Will you use my information for direct mailings?
We will send electronic mail or other mail to you, for the purpose of informing you of changes or additions to Ancestry.com, or of any Ancestry.com or Ancestry related products and services. If you do not want to receive such mailings, you may opt out at any time by using the unsubscribe link listed in the e-mail or by amending your "newsletter and email preferences" in the "My Account" section of the site.

May I refuse to provide personal information to you or to accept advertising?
Visitors may access Ancestry.com’s free services by providing a first name, last name, and e-mail address or other information that we may deem appropriate to that purpose. To gain full access to the members-only areas, a username, e-mail address and appropriate billing information are required. Because the Ancestry.com Website is partially advertiser supported, you may not "turn off" the advertising that appears on Ancestry.com pages, but you may opt to be excluded from any e-mail advertising.

Do you use "IP Addresses" and cookies?
IP Addresses:
We do use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server, and to administer our Website. Your IP address is also used to gather broad demographic information such as geographic distribution of our members and may be used to “geolocate” our members to allow us to provide services appropriate to your place of residence.

Cookies:
Contrary to popular myth, cookies do not extract private or personal information from your computer’s memory, but rather, record only information you volunteer to us upon registering or visiting the Website. Cookies are tiny files placed onto the hard drive of your computer when you register at our Website that enable our server to recognize or "remember" who you are each time you return. We may make limited use of cookies to deliver content specific to your interests. For instance, we may use cookies to retain your personal preferences, hold session information for a "shopping basket," or save your password so it doesn’t have to be re-entered each time you login.

You can delete or block cookies from your computer if you want to (your browser help function should tell you how to do this), but certain Ancestry services may not work correctly or at all if you delete and/or block cookies.

Advertiser Cookies:
We may use third-party advertising companies to serve ads on our behalf. These companies may employ cookies and action tags (also known as single pixel gifs or web beacons) to measure advertising effectiveness. Any information that these third parties collect via cookies and action tags is completely anonymous. If you would like more information about this practice and your choices, click here. Ancestry.com uses various vendors to serve targeted advertising. If you wish to opt-out from these vendors, click here.

Ancestry.com uses the Better Advertising assurance service to comply with the cross-industry Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising managed by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) (https://www.aboutads.info). As part of this service, Ancestry.com online advertisements are sometimes delivered with icons that help consumers understand how their data is being used and provide choice options for consumers that want more control.

When do you distribute or publish information on the living on your Websites?
Posts contributed by our members to message boards and other community areas may include information on the living. While we advise our members to be sensitive to privacy issues, we have no control over the content of these posts. If such a post violates our Terms and Conditions, you may notify us at "report abuse" and we will help work toward resolving the issue.

We do republish databases that contain published information on the living, such as white pages, people finder directories and some birth, death and marriage records. The information in these databases has been gathered from public records released by governmental and other agencies, and is available elsewhere, often on the Internet.

What else should I know about privacy?
The following details a few key issues mentioned in context above:

Member Profiles
When you sign up as a member, you are provided with a public member profile pre-populated with your chosen user name and, as you use the site, with other information. Your user name and location will be displayed on the site when you post, comment, or interact with the Ancestry community. If you want additional privacy, you can edit your user name within your public profile to one that does not include any personally identifiable information. You can also enhance your public profile to provide additional information about yourself. Any information including sensitive information disclosed in this area becomes public and you should therefore exercise caution when deciding what you chose to disclose.

Through the "Community Preferences" link in the Ancestry "My Account" section of the site, you can chose either to display your email address to other members or ensure that your email address is withheld so that you are only contacted anonymously through the Ancestry Connection Service. You can also control when you are contacted or block certain people from contacting you.

You can also customize what other members can learn about your Ancestry site activity. To help you connect with other members researching similar ancestors, by default new accounts are set up to allow other members to learn about things you publicly add or post to the site, as well as some personal research activities (such as saving historical records to your Shoebox or private member tree). To customize these settings, simply go to the “Activity Preferences” link on the Community Preferences page.

To make other changes to your public profile, go to the "My Public Profile" or "My Site Preferences" section of the site.

Additional Services
If you purchase additional services from us, such as DNA testing, additional policies may apply regarding how we maintain and use that information and your rights to control that information.

Contests & Promotions
We may occasionally run contests or other special promotions on our Website in which we ask members or visitors for contact information (like an e-mail address) or demographic information (like a zip code, age, or income level). We use this data to send users promotional material about our company or our partners. The participant’s contact information is also used to contact him or her when necessary and may be shared with other companies for promotional purposes, but only with your prior permission and under the terms and conditions specified when you take part in the promotion. At any time, you may opt-out of receiving future mailings of this kind, or simply decline to take part in the promotions.

Contact Us
Here is how to contact us with questions about our privacy statement and practices or your activities on Ancestry.com.