Photo security

Question

I need to see if someone would mind looking at the uploaded photo's for myself, my late husband, & my parents to see if 1) they were ever set as open for a length of time 2) if there was a breach.

An unknown distant relative put them on Ancestry.com. I only use my photos here.  I've written the Ancestry legal department to have them scrubbed from their sever, but I need to know how this happened in case I set a privacy level wrong.

Comments

I don't have an answer but maybe you should add topic tags to your post: privacy, security, photos, etc.

This may get the attention of members with experience in those areas.

Good luck!

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Great idea!

Answer 1

Hi Lucy,

How frustrating!

From the point of view of a regular member I can only access the thumbnail images, the full size images are privacy protected and unavailable to me. I presume that access to the full size images is only granted to people on your trusted list. Did you add the distant relative to your trusted list? Or anyone else for that matter? Does the distant relative who put them on Ancestry have an explanation as to how they got them?

Comments

I don't even know who the distant relative is. He's not using his name on Ancestry nor does he have a tree showing. It's a frustrating situation.

Answer 2

Lucy, I don't believe it is possible to see any history on privacy settings.

Not everyone knows that we are not able to set privacy for images, although they do have different privacy levels.  Images automatically take their privacy levels from the profiles that are attached to them.  If an attached profile is private then the image will be private.  If multiple profiles are attached to the same image and even one of them is private then the image will be private.  If all profiles attached to an image are either open or public, that is the only way the image will be public.

I hope this helps.

Comments

Hi Gaile,

Regarding your comments:

If an attached profile is private then the image will be private.  If multiple profiles are attached to the same image and even one of them is private then the image will be private.  If all profiles attached to an image are either open or public, that is the only way the image will be public.

My understanding from the Photo Privacy Help Page is that if an attached profile is public/open then the image will be public. If multiple profiles are attached to the same image and even one of them is public/open then the image will be public. If all profiles attached to an image are private, that is the only way the image will be private.

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That's what worried me. There's living people in every one of these photos so they should be marked as private. I'm just wondering if I messed something up. The photos were uploaded to Ancestry over a year ago so there's no telling how many people have downloaded them. I'm trying to convince angry family to allow the pics to stay here.