My Heritage privacy concern

[kiterunner]

I realise that every day, people are getting surprising DNA test results and finding out that their father isn't their biological father, or that they were adopted, they don't match someone they expected to match, or get an unexpected close match with someone they have never heard of. And because so many people have done DNA tests now, it is possible to find you have very close matches, such as a parent or a sibling, as soon as you look at your DNA match list for the first time. Yes, that's how DNA testing is now.

Ancestry is the site that I spend most of my time on, looking through my DNA matches and trying to figure out how they are related to me. (As people on here probably know by now, I discovered that my grandmother's father was not who she thought he was, so a lot of my DNA matches were mysteries to me!) I have also uploaded my raw DNA data to a few other sites to see what matches I got on those, including My Heritage. I had noticed that when viewing a DNA match (let's call him Fred) on My Heritage, the list of shared matches with "Fred" shows an estimate of how closely related each of them is to "Fred" as well as how closely they are related to me. Unlike on ancestry, where it shows how closely they are related to me, but I have to figure out how they are related to "Fred" by looking at their family trees etc.

Today, I have been trying to sort out a group of shared matches on My Heritage, trying to figure out what the connection is, and I looked at the family tree of one of them ("Fred") but they seemed to have no connection to the other people in the group. Then I looked through the list of "Fred"'s shared matches to see if any were particularly closely related to him / her, which might be a clue. Lo and behold, one of them was labelled as "Fred"'s mother! But her name didn't match the mother's name in "Fred"'s family tree.

I guess that "Fred" is adopted and maybe My Heritage helped him find his birth family, and that's great. But I really do question whether it is a good idea for My Heritage to make it so easy for "Fred"'s very distant relatives to automatically see who his birth mother is. As far as I can figure out, the "my privacy" settings on My Heritage don't give you an option of not showing how people are related to you. You can choose not to let people view your DNA segments, but it will still show relationships. Or of course you can remove your data completely from DNA matching.

And this could happen as soon as "Fred"'s DNA is added to My Heritage's database - distant relatives could see who his birth parents are before he does! Seems wrong to me.

[Kit]

All the DNA testing is great but there is no thought given by any of the companies as to the ramifications of the results. We had genetic testing for medical reasons years ago but there was counselling involved in case of a bad outcome.

In your case though only Fred's mother is going to know for sure Fred was born and adopted out. We don't know Fred knew before the test. We also don't know if Fred or mum want to have contact, nor want their family to know the situation. I can understand labelling people as mother etc on their own record but I agree that doing it for other people is wrong