Data Deletion

What there is to delete

There are no user accounts on this website, so in most cases what a person wants removed is one of three things: a contact detail of theirs that appears on a listing, something they submitted through a form, or a family record held for the app’s directory.

How to ask

• Write to us, by the contact form or by email, saying what should be removed and where you saw it — the page address is the most useful thing you can give us.
• To remove your own personal contact detail we do not ask you to prove who you are and we do not ask why. To remove an institution’s listing we do ask that the request comes from the institution, because otherwise anybody could delete anybody.

What happens then

We acknowledge within 24 hours. The detail is removed from the source data and the site is rebuilt and republished, which normally happens the same week and takes the item off every one of the three language versions at once. Anything sitting in the moderation queue is marked and not used. Where a search engine still shows an old copy we ask it to refresh, though how quickly it does is not in our hands.

A removal from the app’s family directory is done in the same way and means removed, not hidden. Backups roll over on their own schedule, and a record can survive in a backup for a short period after it has gone from the live data; it is not restored to the site.