At Ancestry, your privacy is a top priority. We are committed to being good stewards of your Personal Information, as described in this Statement, handling it in a responsible manner, and securing it with industry standard administrative, technical, and physical safeguards. Ancestry adheres to the following overarching principles when it comes to your privacy:
- Transparency. We work hard to be transparent about what Personal Information we collect and process.
- Simplicity. We strive to use easy-to-understand language to describe details of our service (which can sometimes be complicated). We want to help you understand our terms and policies so you can make informed choices.
- Control. You have control over the Personal Information you provide to us, including your DNA Data, and how it is used, shared, and retained.
When you make new discoveries with us, you should feel confident and informed. Our full Privacy Statement is below and we encourage you to read it.
Effective Date: September 25, 2017
1. Introduction
At Ancestry, our mission is to help you discover where you come from, who you are related to, and what makes you unique. To fulfill this mission, we collect, process and store your Personal Information as you use our websites, mobile applications, and services (collectively the “Services”). Personal Information is information that can identify you or reasonably be linked back to you, such as your name, email address, or unique identifier linked to your account. This Privacy Statement describes our practices for collecting and processing your Personal Information, and how we enable you to control your Personal Information held by us. In addition, we have a separate Cookie Policy that describes our use of browser cookies and similar tracking technologies.
Applicability and Data Controllers
This Privacy Statement describes the privacy practices of the Ancestry websites and mobile apps that link to this Statement, including Ancestry.com and AncestryDNA.com.
If you reside in the United States, Ancestry Operations, Inc. and Ancestry.com DNA LLC are responsible for the use of your data and respond to any requests related to your Personal Information.
If you reside outside the United States, Ancestry Information Operations Unlimited Company (Ireland) is your data controller.
Contact information for these entities is listed at the bottom of this Statement.
Consent
When you create an account to access our Services, you provide us your name, email address, and choose a password, and have the choice to agree to our Ancestry Terms and Conditions and/or our Ancestry DNA Terms and Conditions and this Privacy Statement by clicking “Continue,” on the account creation page. This affirmative act indicates you consent to the collection, processing, and sharing of your Personal Information (including your Genetic Information from an Ancestry DNA test) under this Privacy Statement (which includes our Cookie Policy and other documents referenced in this Privacy Statement). At any time, you can selectively delete any information you have uploaded into your account, such as family tree information, or your Genetic Information. If you no longer wish to have an Ancestry account, please contact us here and we will close your account and delete your Personal Information from your account, as described in Section 7 below.
Changes to this Statement
We may modify this Privacy Statement at any time, and if we make material changes to it, we will notify you through our Services, or by other means, to provide you the opportunity to review the changes before they become effective. If you object to any changes, you may delete your account by contacting us here. Your continued use of our Services after we publish or send a notice of changes to this Privacy Statement means that you are consenting to the updated Privacy Statement.
2. Information We Collect From You
Account Information: Your name, email address, and a password are necessary to create an Ancestry account. When you purchase a DNA kit from us we also collect your shipping address. If you contact Member Services by phone, we may collect your phone number for your account security and future identity verification.
Credit Card/Payment Information: Payment information is necessary to purchase the Ancestry DNA service and other subscriptions offered by Ancestry.
DNA Kit Activation Information: This information consists of your DNA Kit Code, your sex, and year of birth and is necessary to activate a DNA kit and perform quality assurance testing.
Profile Information: This is voluntary information (although you must choose a user name which can be an alias) to identify yourself and provide other information about yourself to other users of the Services.
User Provided Content: This information is voluntarily provided by you to populate your family tree, including stories, images, and any details about the individuals you list in your family tree. This information may be enhanced by records available under an Ancestry subscription or from other Ancestry members.
Genetic Information: You submit your biological sample (saliva, from which we extract your DNA) in the tube provided in your Ancestry DNA kit. Our laboratory partner tests the biological sample to determine your unique genetic makeup and turn it into machine-readable code (“DNA Data”). The sample tubes, are only marked with a code (“tube code”). In addition to the tube code, Ancestry also provides your self-reported sex, and birth year to our laboratory partner, which are used for quality assurance testing. For clarity, DNA Data is Genetic Information, and is necessarily produced as part of the DNA testing process, undertaken at our laboratory partners facilities and transferred to Ancestry. Genetic Information also includes information derived from your DNA Data by Ancestry, such as your ethnicity estimate, and your genetic relatives present in our data base, and any Genetic Communities (aggregations of DNA Data with common characteristics such as shared ancestors). Additionally, your DNA Data contains genetic markers that may be associated with physical traits such as hair color or may be associated with your health or wellness.
Social Media Information: If you use Facebook to log into Ancestry services that support Facebook Connect, we will have access to information from your Facebook profile that you consent to provide to us (for example your profile information and your friends list).
Additional User Information: This is self-reported information that you may provide to us when you opt-in to answer email surveys and online questionnaires offered through the Services.
Your Comments and Communications: If you voluntarily post any comments on our Services or participate in community discussions, chats, one-on-one communications with Member Services or communicate using Ancestry’s messaging services with other users, Ancestry will collect that information. You should be aware that any information you provide in these areas can be read, collected, and used by other participants in these communications.
Contests and Promotions: Ancestry occasionally runs contests and special promotions through our Services in which we may ask you for Personal Information or demographic information (such as zip code, or similar geographic information, age, or contact information). We use this data to run the contests or promotions and send you promotional material about our company or third parties we deal with. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary. We may use your information to contact you when necessary or share your contact information with other companies for promotional purposes, but only with your prior permission and under the Terms and Conditions specified when you take part in the promotion. At any time, you may opt-out of receiving future Contest or Promotional correspondence by following the unsubscribe instructions in each promotional communication, making selections in your account settings, or by simply declining to participate.
3. Information We Collect Through Use of the Services
Computer and Mobile Device Information: We collect information about how you access our website or mobile applications, including the website you visited prior to landing on Ancestry’s site. We also automatically receive the internet protocol (“IP”) address of your computer or the proxy server that you use to access the internet, in addition to other technical information such as your computer operating system details, your type of web browser, the web pages you visit immediately prior and upon leaving Ancestry websites, your mobile device (including your mobile device identifier provided by your mobile device operating system), your mobile operating system, and the name of your internet service provider or mobile carrier. Any collection of location information through your device is controllable using your device’s location sharing settings.
Information from Cookies, Beacons, Mobile SDKs, and similar technologies: We use cookies and similar technologies, including beacons in email messages, and application developer platforms that use mobile Software Development Kits ("SDKs") to collect information about your use of any mobile application that we make available to you. Such web behavior information is used to improve our Services and your user experience. These practices and your control over them can be found in our Cookie Policy.
Information shared through social media features: If you engage with social media functionality available in the Services, for example “Like,” “Tweet,” “Pin,” or “Follow Us” links to sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube that appear in our Services, Ancestry will collect your interactions and whatever social media account information such services make available to us. Additionally, these social media services may also collect information from your interaction such as your IP address and the URL of the page where the social media button is located. Your interactions with these social features are governed by the privacy statement of the social network company.
Information from your use of the Services
We collect data about your activities using the Services, including search, record access, public family tree access, web page views, click tracking, adding people to your tree, as well as other interactions with the Services.
4. Information We Collect From Other Sources
Information from Public and Historical Records: Ancestry collects records from various sources, with appropriate consents and permissions where relevant, usually from official record sources, including newspapers, as well as birth, death, and marriage records, which may contain Personal Information relating to you. These records are generally part of Ancestry’s subscription Services.
Information from Third Parties: We may also receive information about you from third parties. For example, we may supplement the data we collect with demographic information licensed from third parties in order to personalize the Service and our offers to you. We may also collect Personal Information like an email address of others when you purchase gift subscriptions.
5. Uses of Your Information
We use your Personal Information to provide, personalize, understand, improve, update and expand our Services. This includes using your information to:
- Detect and protect against error, fraud, or other criminal or malicious activity, including protecting the safety and integrity of Ancestry, its users, and other parties, and enforcing our Terms and Conditions.
In addition, Ancestry processes your Personal Information for the following primary purposes:
- Authenticate your access to the Services and improving Ancestry information security;
- Process your payments for subscriptions, Ancestry DNA services and kits, and other premium products and features;
- Build new and improve existing products, features, and functionality for you and other Ancestry members. This includes creating wholly new products, in addition to enhancing the customer experience across the Services.
- Help you and other members create family trees by finding individuals in public trees through Ancestry’s search functionality, as well as providing insights about your family tree as it might relate to other Ancestry members’ trees and genealogical research.
- Issue surveys and questionnaires to collect Additional User Information for use in the Services, as well as to facilitate product development and research initiatives;
- Communicate with you about the Services, such as when we:
- Respond to your inquiries to Member Services;
- Alert you to potential relatives identified by genetic matching, or your assignment to one of our Genetic Communities;
- Alert you to records pertaining to people in your family tree;
- Inform you of product changes, new products or services;
- Ask you to participate in Ancestry media productions or testimonials; and,
- Provide you information or request action in response to technical, security, and other operational issues.
- Market new products and offers from us, or our business partners. This includes user-personalized advertising. You can control of marketing communications by using the unsubscribe link in the email or through your account preferences.
- Conduct scientific, statistical, and historical research.
Ancestry processes your Genetic Information for the following primary purposes:
- Delivery of ethnicity results, Genetic Community information, genetic matches (e.g., close relatives or distant cousins) from our database, and other information to help you learn more about yourself, your relatives and genetic family groups, and other aspects of and insights into your Genetic Communities as well as what your DNA reveals about traits, personal health and wellness (“DNA Results”).
- Connecting you with other users by sharing your DNA Results with potential genetic relatives through features such as genetic matching, Genetic Communities, or other product features and to provide relevant results and suggestions to assist you and others to discover common ancestors and other details about your family history, as well as to help you connect with friends and family.
- Studying population and ethnicity-related health, wellness, aging, disease or other health or physical conditions, and predispositions to the same.
- Conducting research and development to improve features and functionality in our existing DNA-related products, enhance the customer experience across Ancestry products, improve the quality of our laboratory processes and technology, and, build new products and services for you, including services related to personal health and wellness.
In addition to the foregoing description of Ancestry’s primary processing purposes, we will seek additional consent from you when collecting and processing personal data of a sensitive nature (for example, health history), as part of your interaction with the Services.
6. When We Share Your Information
Ancestry does not share your individual Personal Information (including your Genetic Information) without your additional consent other than as described in this Privacy Statement. The limited circumstances described below explain when sharing might occur:
- Service Providers: We share your Personal Information with certain third-party service providers who help us provide the Services to you, such as our laboratory partners, credit card processors, cloud services infrastructure providers, and vendors that assist us in marketing, analytics, and fraud prevention. All of our service providers that have any access to your Personal Information are subject to contractual obligations, to ensure data security and confidentiality, consistent with this Privacy Statement and applicable laws. These entities are considered extensions of Ancestry and abide by our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Statement. Examples of these service providers includes our DNA kit shipping service provider (who will know your address), some marketing technology providers such as SalesForce, and our laboratory partners (who test your DNA as described above (but not know who you are)).
- Research Partners: Other than service providers, we will share your pseudonymized Genetic Information with third party research partners when you provide us your express consent to do so in advance, such as through our Informed Consent to Research. By agreeing to the Informed Consent to Research you agree to the specified uses in that document. Research partners may include commercial or non-profit organizations that conduct or support scientific research or conduct or support the development of therapeutics, medical devices or related material to treat, diagnose or predict health conditions.
- For Legal or Regulatory Requirements: We may share your Personal Information if we believe it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, valid legal process (e.g., subpoenas or warrants served on us), or governmental or regulatory request, to enforce or apply the Ancestry Terms and Conditions, to protect the security or integrity of the Services, and to protect the rights, property, or safety, of Ancestry, our employees or members. If we are required to disclose your Personal Information to a governmental body, we will do our best to provide you with advance notice, unless we are prohibited under the law from doing so. Additionally, our laboratory partners may be subject to regulatory requirements to retain some of your information under the Clinical Laboratory Improvements Amendments regulations, regulations administered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or other applicable clinical laboratory regulations.
- If Ancestry is Acquired: We will share your Personal Information in the event that the Ancestry or its businesses are acquired or transferred (in whole or part and including in connection with any bankruptcy or similar proceedings) to another entity. The promises in this Privacy Statement will apply to your Personal Information as transferred to the new entity.
A note about aggregate data: Ancestry may disclose member information in an aggregated, pseudonymized form as part of the Services, our marketing (for example, we might note the percentage of immigrants in a State that are from a particular geographic region or country), or scientific publications by us or our research partners.
7. Your Choices and Access to Your Personal Information
Privacy Settings: You are in control of your Personal Information provided to Ancestry. For example, you can access and update the information Ancestry collects directly from you such as your email address, user name, profile information, etc. (See, Section 2, above).
Additional controls that help you manage your privacy settings on Ancestry sites, can be found here. Also, to learn how to manage the privacy settings for any family trees you have created on Ancestry.com, please click here.
Further, Ancestry strives to make it simple for you to manage your privacy within the context of the Services, and you can manage your privacy settings for our related brands by clicking on the following links:
Access to the settings are also contained within Ancestry’s mobile applications, such as We’re Related.
If you wish to not have data about your interests or behaviors used for serving you targeted ads, you may manage your choices in the ways described in our Cookie Policy.
Family Tree Information Download: Ancestry allows you to download your family tree information in the standard GEDCOM family tree file format in your Family Tree Settings.
Genetic Information Download: Your DNA Data belongs to you. You always have the option of downloading a file with your DNA Data. Learn how here. For more information on what is included in your DNA Data download, go here.
Deletion: You can delete your Personal Information from Ancestry in a number of ways. You can generally remove Personal Information directly through the Services, although a few types of Personal Information require additional steps. If you require assistance deleting Personal Information you provided as part of your profile or subscription or from our blog or community forum, please submit a detailed deletion request (including the exact wording of the information as it appears on the websites, and the URL where that information is found) to our Member Services team. Please note however, if you have shared information through the Services (for example, by making your family trees public, or by sharing your DNA Results directly with other members), Ancestry will not be able to remove any copies of information that other Ancestry members may have copied.
Also, removal of Personal Information from certain public records (for example, a census) may not be possible. Ancestry may have contractual rights to record sets that might contain your Personal Information that may not be able to be deleted. Additionally, Ancestry may hold records that contain your Personal Information that we are obligated to maintain as archives. We are not able to change the information in public records published through our Services and you need to contact the entity responsible for such records. We will consider requests for removal of Personal Information from the searchable indexes of the records we hold on a case-by-case basis and will endeavor to fully respect your requests to remove Personal Information. Additionally, some of your Personal Information may be included in other Ancestry members’ family trees, which will only be removed if the other Ancestry customer deletes it.
Deletion of Genetic Information: If you request Ancestry delete your DNA Results, we will delete all Genetic Information, including any derivative Genetic Information (ethnicity estimates, genetic cousin matches, etc.) from our production, development, analytics, and research systems within 30 days. Additionally, you may request the destruction of your physical DNA sample by contacting Member Services. Please note that if you have agreed to our Informed Consent to Research, we will not be able to remove your pseudonymized Genetic Information from active or completed research projects, but we will not use it for any new research projects.
Generally: All Ancestry member data will persist in our backup systems after it has been deleted from our production, development, analytics, and research systems for up to 6 months before it is overwritten. Also, as noted above, under Section 6, our laboratory partners may retain pseudonymized information in order to comply with regulatory requirements. Ancestry may also retain certain information for tax and payment industry regulatory compliance purposes.
8. Security
Ancestry uses industry standard administrative, physical, and technical security measures to protect user data. We have measures in place to protect against inappropriate access, loss, misuse, or alteration of Personal Information (including Genetic Information) under our control. Using both in-house and third-party partners, Ancestry’s Security Team regularly reviews our security and privacy practices and enhances them as necessary to help ensure the integrity of our systems and your Personal Information. We use secure server software to encrypt Personal Information (including Genetic Information), and we only partner with third parties that meet and commit to our security standards. While we cannot guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of data will not occur, we use commercially reasonable efforts to prevent this. It is also important for you to guard against unauthorized access to your Personal Information by maintaining strong passwords and protecting against the unauthorized use of your own computer or device.
9. Data Transfer
Any transfer of your Personal and Genetic Information, between Ancestry’s Ireland-based controller and its U.S.-based controller for processing in the United States, is conducted pursuant to transfer mechanisms such as Standard Contractual Clauses.
10. Not Intended for Minors
Ancestry’s Family History Services are directed at adults and are intended for users who are at least 18 years old. If you are 13 years old or older, you may use Ancestry’s Family History services with your parent or guardian’s permission. We do not knowingly seek or collect any Personal Information from children under the age of 13 and children under the age of 13 cannot use our Services. If Ancestry becomes aware that we have unknowingly collected any personal data directly from a child under the age of 13, we will take commercially reasonable efforts to delete such data from our system.
Ancestry DNA tests are only available to persons who are at least 18 years old. A parent or legal guardian may activate a DNA test, provide us Personal Information about a minor child, and send us the saliva sample of a minor child for processing using an account for that child that is directly managed by the parent or legal guardian. By activating a DNA test for, or submitting any Personal Information about, a minor you represent that you are the minor’s parent or legal guardian, that you have discussed this with the minor and the minor has agreed to the collection and processing of their saliva as described in this Privacy Statement.
11. Regulatory Compliance and Dispute Resolution
We seek to resolve all privacy matters reported to us. However, if you have an unresolved privacy or data use concern that we have not addressed satisfactorily, you can also contact our U.S.-based third-party dispute resolution provider (free of charge) here .
Users outside of the United States may contact the Irish Data Protection Commission, or your local Data Protection Authority.
California’s Shine the Light Law
California Civil Code Section 1798.83, known as the “Shine the Light” law, permits Users who are California residents to request and obtain from us a list of what Personal Information (if any) we disclosed to third parties for direct marketing purposes in the preceding calendar year and the names and addresses of those third parties. Requests may be made only once a year and are free of charge. Under Section 1798.83, Ancestry currently does not share any Personal Information with third parties for their own direct marketing purposes.
Do-Not-Track Disclosure
Ancestry notes that although we do our best to honor your privacy preferences, and have implemented industry standard safeguards as described above, we do not respond to Do-Not-Track signals from your browser at this time due to the lack of a neutral and consistent industry standard. Ancestry uses advertising technology to show you advertising relevant to your Ancestry experience. Also, when Ancestry uses third-party services, data, and software tools to target advertising to you, these third parties may collect information (such as a randomly generated unique cookie identifier) about your online activities over time and across third party websites or services on our behalf. Controls to help you manage third party tracking via advertising are detailed in our Cookie Policy.
If you have any questions or concerns about this privacy statement, our privacy practices, our Services, or wish to update, access or receive information about the personal data we maintain about you, you can contact us as follows:
Ancestry members can reach us using these phone numbers, or you may submit questions using this web form.
Official correspondence must be sent via postal mail to:
For members located in the United States:
Ancestry.com Operations Inc.
Attn: Privacy Office
153 Townsend Street, Suite 800
San Francisco, CA 94107
For members located outside of the United States:
Ancestry Information Operations Unlimited Company
Attn: Privacy Office
52-55 Sir John Rogerson Quay
Dublin 2
Ireland