Who Actually Owns the Family Tree You Have Online? | Family History Daily

This is an sll-too-common experience. I had a similar experience with MyHeritage. Who Actually Owns the Family Tree You Have Online? | Family History Daily:

Years ago, I chose to backup my GEDCOMs and related data with a fairly popular online service dedicated to that purpose. I let the service automatically save and upload my files as they were updated. It was very convenient and my account was 100% private, only for my use…or so I thought. One day I was doing some research online and came across my own tree. My private research online. I was shocked. I had not, at that time, publicly uploaded my tree to any online sharing site, yet there it was, with all of my personally collected records, notes and more. How had this happened? After doing some considerable digging I discovered that the backup service I was using was bought out by a large genealogy company and they had taken all of my files and published them online in their databases…and they were charging for the information. I was horrified. Not only had I put countless hours of research into private trees that were now available for anyone to access without my permission, but I knew much of the information I had in my trees was not 100% accurate.

As I said, I had a similar experience -- see here MyHeritage.com — another scam site? | Hayes & Greene family history.