What profiles are private?

Geni supports both public profiles (for our shared historical ancestors) as well as private profiles for more-recent generations.  Private profiles may be viewed and edited only by:

• The managers of the profile and the users in the Family Groups of the managers
• The users in the maximum Family Group of the private profile
• Geni curators
• Geni employees 

For an illustration of how privacy works on Geni, please see our Privacy page.

All living profiles (those that are not Geni users, and not Master Profiles) are kept private and will not be searchable on Google and other Internet search engines.  Private profiles will appear obscured to Geni users other than those listed above:

Geni users can choose whether or not they want their profile to appear in Internet search engines; for more information please see the FAQ How do I control what is listed publicly?

When you add a profile for a deceased person to Geni, the system will automatically decide whether or not to make the profile public.  Profiles for people born more than 150 years ago are made public.  If no birth year is provided, a combination of other factors are considered.  You can identify which profiles are public by the green globe at the end of the name on the profile page, or by the green border around the profile photo / silhouette in the tree view:

If you would like to change the privacy on a deceased profile, you may do so by updating the privacy settings of the profile.  Please note that profiles for persons born more than 150 years ago should be public, as these profiles will have hundreds or thousands of descendants and marking them private will create branches in the historical tree that many others will be unable to view or merge.  If you have privacy concerns about ancestors born more than 150 years ago, it's best to limit the information you place on those profiles to that which is already publicly available, or to not add those profiles to Geni at all.  And of course if you have no privacy concerns about deceased persons born in the past 150 years, you are welcome to make them public (within the limits of your local laws).