A quick google shows that there are many who have put this much better than me, so rather than rabbiting on about it, I've posted some links below for your perusal.

Suffice to say, we have decided not to freely display full details of any living members of the family tree born after 1920 (the last year the Victorian Government has made birth records publicly available) on the web.

However, more details will be made available to bona fide family researchers, who will soon be able to apply for a login to the secure section of the site.

Anyone who does not want their details to be made available in the online family tree at all can contact me to have them removed. You will need to supply full birth names of all the people who's details you want suppressed, so that I can locate them.

DO be aware that this server is located in Switzerland and so privacy laws in your country may not affect the running of this server. Having said that, every effort is being and will be made to ensure secure operation of this important genealogical resource.

"Privacy on the Internet - Effect on Genealogy" is a long article that raises some good points:

• "Credit card thieves and other rip-off artists were successfully obtaining the personal information of unsuspecting victims long before the invention of the World Wide Web. But why make it even easier for them?"
• "Other reasons for privacy of living people's genealogy include:
  • Desire for privacy re adoption / step-children issues.
  • Ex in-laws included in trees that don't want to be there, or are not even aware they are included when they haven't had anything to do with the family for twenty years (or the reporting family doesn't want them there).
  • Early/previous marriages not wanted to be "advertised."
  • Inappropriate use of this information by spiteful ex-spouses, neighbors, competitors at work, employers, who-knows-who.
  • Vanity reasons for keeping age private."

"Genealogical Privacy - A Contrarian's View" can be best summed up in one extract - "If you send me information, it will be shared with anyone who wishes it, and no attempt will be made to hide it. If you do not feel comfortable with this attitude or want to hide family secrets, do not share them with me!".

Another good point is this " ...a far larger number of people have complained that they and their families were left out of a genealogy than have complained that they were included."

Another family tree member raised this very good point, which I will attempt to answer to the best of my knowledge.

We set out to identify all the descendants of John and Bridget Delaney who arrived in Victoria 150 years ago. Standard genealogical techniques were used - gathering and collecting all the relevant information from the different branches of the family down the generations, supplemented by publicly available Births Deaths and Marriages records.

The first tree, collated by Mary O'Callaghan (nee Phillips) appeared in the 1978 book Delaney/Dunne Reunion 1978 by Joe Delaney. It next appeared in updated form in Mary's own 1983 book A Long Way From Tipperary, containing some 3,000 individuals' names.

Once that information was published, more word of mouth began to fill in the gaps, until the Victorian Government released CDs of all the Births, Deaths & Marriage records from the start of records until 1921?. This enabled automated updating of family tree records with details from the CDs, rasing the count to it's present 4,300.

This is the basis of the information used for the latest book and family tree Delaneys Corner: The Story of a Family from Newhill, Tipperary and Nirranda, Victoria, published to co-incide with the most recent family reunion on Jan 15th 2005. The online information comes from this book and continues to be updated by family members.