MyHeritage - honest genealogy or hidden agenda?

Today I came across MyHeritage, where you can upload a picture of yourself and compare it to lookalike celebs - among some other features.

The website seems to be a huge success: in roughly half a year more than 4000 blog articles referred to it. Also a large number of mainstream media jumped in, like The Washington Post, Le Soir and The Sun. Most of the management members (one of them is a Bible scholar) claim to be genealogy enthousiasts.

Such a service sounds fun, but a little alarmbell went off when I learned that leaving your email address is required. Although these people might have perfectly sincere intentions, imagine how convenient the fast growing database could be for 'third party institutions'.

Here's the url (until further research is done, I advise to NOT upload personal photo's... however, for the sake of experimenting, you might want to use some pictures of psychopaths :) )

http://www(dot)myheritage.com

Any thoughts from other Sott members about this service?
 
salleles said:
Any thoughts from other Sott members about this service?
Data gathering agency. Selling these data. How useful for the intelligence agencies is to have photos (and their owners can be traced back by email+IP). And what you thing Google makes its living from? Selling IP's+keywords searched for. That's natural and evident.
 
You could always use a mail address from something like www(dot)mailinator(dot)com if you're so inclined.
 
Furthermore, to hide your IP address you could also be surfing via an anonymous proxy. But, like Ark indicated, it might be better to completely stay away from this service.
 
Back
Top Bottom