Hello,
I want to share my GEDCOM with others, bud I discovered to my distresss that it appears to contain email addresses for members of my tree. Not everyone I want to share my GEDCOM with should have access to emails (researchers, etc.) Is there any way to strip the email addresses built into the GEDCOM before export?
Thanks
David Deutsch
I think a GEDCOM is just a plain text file. You might be able to open in up in a text editor and do a search and replace.
That suggestion initially occurred to me . . . However, consider that every single email is different, and would have to be manually stripped! If you are dealing with a relatively large tree, that's a huge amount of work . . . AND it has to be re-done every time to generate a new GEDCOM file as a result of updates or changes.
Rather an onerous prospect!
Since the GEDCOM is generated by custom GENI software, presumably assembled from a database directory, it strikes me that it would be a simple programing enhancement for the GEDCOM generator to exclude all data from the "email" category during the generation process.
Am I wrong?
OK . . . so I can work at it to remove emails, and you are proposing a means to do it. But there's an underlying issue here: Does Geni, as a company, really want to be releasing people's emails via GEDCOM generation without at least offering the user the option to strip the info?
The people I know who use GEDCOMs, do so to send the file to others to share family trees. They may not have an inkling that they are disseminating emails this way! Most people are also not technically inclined enough to strip the necessary data, even if they *did* know that emails are being included.
Moreover, the inclusion of emails, aside from being a privacy concern, serves little or no geneaological benefit.
Yet another angle: Suppose the person seeking to generate the GEDCOM **does** want emails included, and does not want to strip them from the file. Does such a person have the right to ointentionally (or unintentionally) disseminate another person's emails without their consent?
Is it a major issue for geni to modify its own GEDCOM generation software to automatically strip emails? I think this is really a big issue.
I see your point. You should turn this into a feature request.