The Blackstone-owned genealogy giant Ancestry.com raised a ton of red flags earlier this month with an update to its terms and conditions that give the company a bit more power over your family photos. From here on out, the August 3 update reads, Ancestry can use these pics for any reason, at any time, forever.
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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.
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The company also noted that it added a helpful clause to clarify that, yes, deleting your documents from Ancestry’s site would also remove any rights Ancestry holds over them. But there’s a catch: if any other Ancestry users copied or saved your content, then Ancestry still holds those rights until these other users delete your documents, too.
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Source: Ancestry.com Gave Itself the Rights to Your Family Photos
Robin Edgar
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