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I don't know what they're up to? I don't know if they're going to turn into ancestry & make people pay & arm & a leg to see the work people are currently doing for free? But I don't trust the place. And here's why:
Everything on their home & about pages are either plays on words or lies. Adding people = managing profiles & memorials. Inviting people = cleaning up a small mess every other time due to duplicates. And merging with people = a never ending unpaid job.
They state "add family" & "between family" yet people are adding every god known to man, myths & also historical & famous people hoping to trace a connection. Lots of people are doing it & here's the thing when you merge...you don't know if you're merging with family or another religious person or fan.
Between this & their collaboration feature privacy & security go straight out the window. Now they're trying to blind people again by making the collaboration a free for all. But that still don't make it a good feature. Plus it still don't do a thing for privacy & security...it just means they're not charging people to have access to your personal info anymore.
I've went to them after a few merges & said I don't like the big tree & want out. They can't/won't get you out. So your options are donating profiles (living people) & memorials (deceased people) to their community (an absolute & total end for privacy & security) or you can delete things you manage.
Now here's another thing that makes one wonder about Geni. Anywhere else you can delete your whole tree with one click of a button. But not here. Here you have to delete 'em one person @ a time. And if they've even been here & visited you can't delete them. And if you can't delete them you can't delete some of the people connected to them.
Here's what finally let me know Geni was up to no good. One person was too busy @ Facebook playing with their application...well he missed all my family forum postings & PMs so when I moved & deleted his stuff he flipped out. So now cuz of one person I've been banned from my own tree...my own info I've added.
Anybody know where I can go to & force them to let me have access to my stuff again. It's our own personal info. If they want to block me from the guy who's pissed at me go ahead. But they can't keep me from my own info.
And no I can't afford an atty. This is one of many things I've been ripped off about. I can't afford an atty for anything else so I shouldn't be able to for this either. There's got to be some kind of moderator site or something?
The complaint has been investigated and resolved to the customer’s satisfaction.
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I recently complained about geni.com on their public board because of their deceptive practices in taking over peoples family trees, they suspended my account with no warning, then entered and used my account to dlete all my complaints, thus giving everyone the impression i had deleted them myself. Very duplicitous. member pf geni who have been made 'curators' that is, 'trusted' members who are allowed to override your wishes, actually admitted to me that they were stealing others work, needless to say they deleted those messages as well. my wife used her account to go on and simply ask why? i had been deleted and they immediately suspended her account as well. Several members of geni have confided to me that they have received anonymous messages to their accounts on geni threatening them and demanding they abandon their entire accounts, or afce unmentioned reprisals. There is no doubt in my mind I was retaliated against for being a critic, and geni is as yet refusing to allow me to retrieve personal things from them such as personal photos and documentation. i had a paying account too. it al started with a requests from w woman named mimi arcata to merge my profiles with hers, giving her managment of them, when I refused...well, here it is only one day later and i have been sealed out of my own account and i would bet one of these "big tree" idealists is now managing all the profiles i laboriously entered over a year and a half. some of them manage 200 thousand profiles, far more than they could ever enter by hand, only by taking over other peoples profiles could they amass such a collection. All so they can feel like big shots.
"refusing to allow me to *retrieve personal things* from them such as personal photos and documentation."
Why in the world would you put the only copies of such important files in someone else's hands?
Geni.com is a place to contribute to an effort whose goal is to build a single genealogical tree of everyone who lives and who has ever lived, without duplicates. It is not designed to be a place to store large, deep private trees that extend beyond 4th cousins and 4th grandparents. Geni is purposely designed to make any profiles that you enter for people who are more removed from you than 4th cousins and 4th grandparents to be accessible, editable and mergeable by others (including complete stangers to yourself)- whether you specifically grant those others permission to do so or not. This is necessary to combine duplicates and allow others to add more information, sources, or make corrections. Your work is not stolen or taken over, but rather, it is concatenated with the work of everyone else. Once that happens, you can not rightly claim that it's yours anymore.
If you are not prepared to share your work, geni.com is not the place for you. And the best way to get your Geni account suspended is to delete or vandalize the work of others- including your own work after it has already been combined/merged with the work of others.
I've been with Geni for almost 2 years now but now I'm leaving. They want me to upgrade to GeniPro to add the family of my fourth great uncle. So long Geni.com, you got GREEDY!
Geni.com should be struck off the WWW and the owners taken to court for misleading the public.They are in breach of their own PRIVACY policies.I took out a years subscription for US$59.40 (Geni Pro) in July 2011. In October of 2011 my privacy was compromised by devious means by staff members of Geni.com; my profile was put up on GOOGLE search without my authorisation.After many "Tickets" requesting they remove the page from Google, and contacting Google Australia eventually it was taken down. I closed my account with them and in the process reminded them that they owe me a partial refund.This has never been paid.To make matters worse these Geni buffoons put my profile back up on Google search(Dec.2011) for their advertising purposes. I am considering legal action against Geni.com staff and management.
yooper400
I was happy with geni, I reached 100 ancestors quickly. I dutifully upgraded to Plus and gave them my cc number. Big mistake. Yesterday with 450-500 ancestors logged, they suddenly blocked my access. Upon finding a person to answer a question (extremely difficult), I was informed that "I" had experienced a quote, " technical failure of a Permanent Nature". Upon further questioning, the message read "Delivery Has Failed Permanently". I was subsequently blocked from further correspondence. Now, whenever I try to log on, I get a welcome to start a new account. In addition, I fear that they will rape my credit card account since I can find no way to cancel anything.
They have incorrect information about me, stating I am deceased! This caused great heartache and also a good deal of trouble for me and others. I was added by someone 2 years ago in their family tree. I don't know this person at all. They listed members of my immediate family only which they probably got off of Intellius or some such site. They had no other people in the tree! So I suspect it was a company owner/employee putting it up to try and tempt me and/or others to join the site and enter information. I am one who does not believe that all of our personal information should be public knowledge, it's dangerous! Especially as a single woman and the only person in the world with my particular name. I also find that to try to contact them, I have to create an account and give an email address... the email address is also made public and available to ANY ONE! I have never heard of such a thing. Also you can't contact them directly only through a blog of some sort and they don't respond directly... or at all! I want my profile removed... I never put it there. I have requested this but not sure it will happen... still waiting. Alexa.com lists their physical address only as:
Geni, Inc
West Hollywood, CA 90069
I just found out contact info for this site:
http://www.geni.com
8491 W Sunset Blvd # 106, West Hollywood, CA [protected]
[protected]
[protected]
I opened a Geni account. Every time I got a notice for a new record, My Heritage (Geni's parent company) wanted a fee to view it. Got fed up and cancelled the Geni account. Almost instantly, a Geni annual fee charge shows up on my credit card account. I called the phone number on the charge and reached My Heritage (Geni's parent company). My Heritage tells me they have no control over Geni or their billing. NOTHING BUT A SCAM!
Too often, I check a relation with a famous person, one day i am related, the next day I am not. This is crap, run far, run fast!
After Being on Geni.com for years they tried to SCREW ME OVER & DID! I added a lot of work over the years and some of my lineage goes to Royalty. SO they decided to have one of their so called volunteers interrogate my lineage, after even trying to cooperate with them they insulted me. After that they blocked my photo editor even though I paid the $100 bucks to be able to add unlimited photo's. They blocked all my capabiliites and took my legal depictions and family photos down for my lineage even after explaining to them that I had the rights. After all that they decided to block me from my own family tree. They even changed their privacy rules, they go into your older lineage as well and can lock it up from you and even go in and change your bios of your ancestrys. These scrupulous geneologists are amatures and if you disagree with them then they BLOCK YOUR account illegally, this is how they treat paying customers. BEWARE OF GENI.COM! Its much safer to go with places that respect the customer like Ancestry.com where no one can tell you how to operate your family tree.