Is large scale screen scraping/data mining of DNA projects right or wrong?

12 Comments

  • Sergei Sidoroff - 10 years ago

    "I quit posing to my website after I noticed so many visitors from Russia."

    Maybe that's because Russians are WORKING...

  • Eric Christensen - 10 years ago

    The PEOPLE (or 'russians' as roberta refers to them) are doing a great, and free, service to the community. I have never had the slightest problem contacting them. In contrast to many american sites which have obviously 'stolen' my data from ftdna, Semargl has posted my data correctly, and offers charts, graphs and maps which ftdna does not.
    I appreciate the good work Semargl has done.

  • ya - 10 years ago

    Do not disgrace, Roberta. Your husband may close their data FTDNA and nobody else and never raped. And apologize to Semargl and YFull.

  • ya - 10 years ago

    Statement from the Director of ISOGG, Katherine Borges:
    I've corresponded with Family Tree DNA President, Bennett Greenspan about the semargl.me website issue and he said that FTDNA was not a party to the blog posting nor did they ask the semargl.me to stop scraping FTDNA's website even though the scraping does eat bandwidth and bogs down the company's web site and can lengthen server responsiveness.

    As the Director of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, I'd like to ask that Vladimir Semargl restore the semargl.me website and I also ask that the YFull website be restored if its still offline. We need to open the lines of communication between the companies, the customers, and the third-party websites to work together for the benefit of the genetic genealogy community to get these issues resolved.

  • John Beardsley - 10 years ago

    I normally find Ms. Estes' blogs well written and informative. The one in question here however I find to be bigoted fear-mongering. As a de-facto spokesperson for ftdna due to her professional relationship with them, Ms. Estes should refrain from knee-jerk, inflammatory rhetoric. Her troubling over emphasis on the fact that the Semargl website is Russian based seems to be her biggest complaint, other than that she appears to find the website and it's contents useful and well done. I hope the majority of people, currently at 57%, who support and have no problem with the Semargl site convince the operators to bring the site back online as soon as possible.

  • Sergiusz - 10 years ago

    It's very stupid to care on "confidentiality" of data which were published on open pages.

  • Bonny Cook - 10 years ago

    Thank you Roberta for bringing this topic to us. It is pure thievery by the Russians noted. I also am appalled that fellow project administrators would support them. This should be a topic at our next Houston meeting.

  • Nina - 10 years ago

    Our ethics are not their ethics. In the cyber world, where we often collide, everything is out of our hands and free for the tech-savvy folks ALL OVER THE WORLD. I can't get upset about it; it won't change. I had to learn that i can't put things on the internet that i don't want other people to have.

    To Alex: Is your other name Peggy?

  • Coralie Smith - 10 years ago

    The benefits here have to outweigh the way the data was obtained. It seems to me to be a slight case of "Russian" paranoia creeping in. How do we know it isn't happening in other fields of the internet. Semargyl isn't exactly hiding away. Perhaps he just needs to communicate better.
    I don't have a problem with it and if ftdna did wouldn't they set up some systems to combat it?
    My name is not attached and no personal details given out so let it benefit others.
    I might be related to a Russian way back for all I know.

  • Alex - 10 years ago

    Guys from Russia great! Support them!

  • John McIntosh - 10 years ago

    Thank you for the article, Roberta.
    I am a member of the R1a project you note above and appreciate the work of the administrators. There is also a facebook page where V. Semargyl contributes. I see the dilemma because his work is obviously helpful but gathering data from the FTDNA database by piracy is clearly unethical.

  • Joan Holloway - 10 years ago

    I quit posing to my website after I noticed so many visitors from Russia.

Leave a Comment

0/4000 chars


Submit Comment