For the first few versions of The Surname Tree we did not even think about privacy, it was only a family tree after all.

But then we realised that some of the relatives were not so happy about having their birth date or the names of their children listed on-line for all to see, and other potential users refused point blank to have an account because of their concerns about privacy.

From the beginning of 2021 we started to rebuild the app with privacy in mind.

Creepy Crawlers

Search engines are a double-edged sword, on the one hand they can be really useful in helping people find you, on the other they do allow third parties to steal all your hard work and put it on their own website.
The Surname Tree has developed a number of strategies to minimise this:

• Less bots
  We restrict the number of bots that are allowed to crawl the website to the countries that are our main market
  
• Less content
  For those bots that we do let in, we restrict the number of pages that they are allowed to crawl.
  
• Hidden relatives
  We prevent bots from crawling relatives that are only visible to logged-in relatives (grey icon)
  
  
We also show you when each biography page was last crawled by a bot - to see for yourself go to the footer of the biography page and hover over the bot icon. If you look at your own biography and hover over the bot you will see the status.

We can also offer the Nuclear Option where no bots ever visit your tree, but this also means that no distant relative will ever find your tree as well!

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