Ancestry Has Just Updated Its Terms of Service and Privacy Statement — Again

This time there is a change buried deep in its language that is of significance to users.

As of the change, effective 3 August 2021, a user can’t change his or her mind about any content uploaded to Ancestry: you’ve just gifted the rights to that content to Ancestry, forever.

This is a major change for all Ancestry.com users. Ancestry.com now claims that it owns all information contributed by the company’s users and the company (Ancestry.com) can use this information for whatever purposes they choose.

As of now, it reads (emphasis added):

… 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.

I am not an attorney and am not qualified to interpret contract law. For a better interpretation of what this means to you, I will refer you to an article written by Judy Russell (who IS an attorney and is widely known as “The Legal Genealogist” at https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2021/08/04/one-big-change-at-ancestry/. )

Read it carefully. You are giving away more than you probably realize.