Posted on 03/03/2023 10:21:13 AM PST by Golden Eagle
Blackstone Group Inc BX.N said on Wednesday it agreed to acquire genealogy provider Ancestry.com Inc from private equity rivals for $4.7 billion, including debt, placing a big bet on family-tree chasing as well as personalized medicine.
Ancestry.com is the world’s largest provider of DNA services, allowing customers to trace their genealogy and identify genetic health risks with tests sent to their home.
Blackstone is hoping that more consumers staying at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic will turn to Ancestry.com for its services.
“We believe Ancestry has significant runway for further growth as people of all ages and backgrounds become increasingly interested in learning more about their family histories and themselves,” David Kestnbaum, a Blackstone senior managing director, said in a statement.
The deal is Blackstone’s first acquisition out of Blackstone Capital Partners VIII, the largest-ever private equity fund that raised $26 billion from investors last year.
Ancestry.com has more than 3 million paying customers in about 30 countries, and earns more than $1 billion in annual revenue. Launched in 1996 as a family history website, it harnessed advances in DNA testing and mobile phone apps in the following two decades to expand its offerings.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Ancestry does not voluntarily provide data of any kind to governmental or judicial bodies or to law enforcement agencies. To provide our Users with the greatest protection under the law, we require all government agencies seeking access to Ancestry customers’ data to follow valid legal process. We do not allow law enforcement to use Ancestry’s services to investigate crimes or to identify human remains.
If we are compelled to disclose your Personal Information to law enforcement, we will do our best to provide you with advance notice, unless we are prohibited under the law from doing so. Ancestry produces a Transparency Report where we list the number of valid law enforcement requests for user data across all our sites.
I am not an attorney and so can't make a substantive statement about how far the new owner of the company is bound by this, or, for that matter, how the new owner of the data is.
They offered free installation of Crowdstrike security software on all client servers. Crowdstrike is connected to deep state Ukraine corruption. How CrowdStrike Became Part of Trump’s Ukraine Call
My grandparents were all dead by the time I was born in 1947. My father was born in Holland and came here as a little boy in 1912. My mother was born in Canada in 1920, and came here as a little girl with her only brother, and their mother. There was no family history past the names of my grandparents. My father didn't even know where his own mother was buried as she'd died not long after they arrived here. I didn't find that info out until my brother died in 1995, when a cousin got in touch.
Many years ago I hired a researcher in Holland to search back 6 or 7 generations. He only provided me with great-grandparents, and even then, a lot was missing. When my mother died in 1990, I traveled to Canada to research her side of the family, but there is still a lot of missing info, like what happened to my grandmother's sister? She's not buried next to her husband in who died in the early thirties and is buried in a double plot. She disappeared from the Covington, Kentucky City Directory in the early 50's, and can't be traced. And there is no information on my mother's father who was supposedly a lumberjack in Tweed, Ontario Canada. I have their marriage info, but no death date, and no burial site. I can't even get any WWII service records for my mother's brother, because his records were destroyed in the big fire at the military records center in St. Louis, in 1973.
I'm the last one left of my family. If I hadn't had my DNA tested through Ancestry.com, I never would have known that besides DNA from England and Northwester Europe, I have DNA from Sweden, Denmark, Germanic Empire, Ireland and Scotland. My parents never knew any of that.
Three year old article.
OOOOPS! Shouldn’t have donated your double helix data to science!
SO MANY PEOPLE knew this was going to happen !
The thinking points are we want to know our ancestry/heritage as you demonstrate.
The better way is family stories and you would prefer that over what you got.
So, tell some stories to others so they know their heritage.
“...valid legal process...”
In other words, send us an email and throw in something about it being important or something for us to cough up your intimate deets.
If she had a Social Security number and died before 2015, there's a good chance you could find her in the SS death records.
No one could have seen that coming.
So the CCP is going to have everyone’s DNA records. Why could possibly go wrong?
And based on what I've learned from family who use ancestry sites with actual historic records, and those who have done dna tests, many of those stories are flat-out wrong.
Because a lot of people want to look at old census records and find family that way to have a complete family tree. I guess I will not be renewing my subscription now. Don’t trust Blackstone
NO Medicare does not have that record, that is just bs
Not mine, nor will they ever get it willingly.
This is not good.
Exactly. No good will come of this.
Doesn’t matter - they have enough of your DNA through your relatives - they can easily “triangulate” you.
Yes. That’s how they find criminals.
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