We have a classmate who is demanding that we remove his name and photo from our site.

Has anyone else faced this issue?

The matter he attended our schools is a matter of public record and his photo was published in an annual.

Just wondering how this has been handled by other people. We are trying to keep an accurate history of our school. We have 109 years worth of graduates on our various sites.

It's a good question, unfortunately I don't know the legalities regarding this, and it's possible it may even vary by state. You can always run it past an Attorney. This is very rare but it has come up several times before, so just a personal opinion, although I understand your desire to preserve the accurate history of all parties attending the school, I'd just remove the name and be done with it. Most likely you'll never hear the end of it until you've zapped the name. Unfortuante I know, but people may have all kinds of reasons for not wanting to be on the site, and they may or may not even be at liberty to share those reasons with you. When push comes to shove I'd honor the removal request.

When we started our web sitein May, 2008 I would often ask classmates if they mind if I put their class photo up on their profile. That got to be too much work so now my standard welcome email to them includes this line: "I upload the yearbook picture when a classmate registers. If you prefer that your picture not be included in your profile just let me know and I will remove it."

To date only one of our 236 classmates has asked that we not include their photo and one wanted a more current photo posted.

This has worked very well for us.

Pat M (ECMHS 1969)

Hi Randy ~ Yes, I had the same problem. When I first started our website in January and sent out the link to all the emails that we had record of, one of our classmates sent a very nast email to the Contact Us (which came to me) and demanding to be taken off the email list, the website and any records. he also went on to say how mistreated he was while in school, etc. That was 30 years ago, but I guess he still held a grudge, so I took him off of our website. I did not, however, remove him from our year book pages. Funny thing is that same guy joined Classmates.com.

Dawn

Randall (Randy) Brown Turnage wrote:

Just take it off and don't worry about it. Put a copy of the request in your hard files.

We have a few of classmates that don't want to hear from us. We put DO NOT MAIL or NO CONTACT PER REQUEST in our records and deleted one per his request.

You just never know how miserable their lives were in school or out and they don't want any reminders of it.

We had a very nasty note too, he send the two reunion info mailings (done about 7 months apart)back unopened in a big brown envelope with the note.

I too had a classmate that was "lost" and after finding her, I called her and then went in and updated her profile with a little bit of info as I could tell by the conversation that she didn't intend on joining. Lo and behold, she went into the website, looked at what I had added and complained that she didn't give me "permission". I deleted my entry and then she emailed again saying that now she was "lost" again. I couldn't please her so I deleted her-and of course sent her am email advising her. Haven't heard from her since. A lot of classmates were military so I understand a lot of them didn't attend high school but maybe one semester but to get snippy about it is inexcusable.

Tina ~ it just goes to show you that you can't please everyone. Some people are very private and I try to respect that. I do however try my best to get them to at least join our site. If they don't want to be contacted by us after joining is up to them. I still have a few classmates that hold a grudge after over 30 years since our school days and you can tell by what they have put in their profiles. I think life is way too short.

Don't let the few classmates who want to be excluded bother you. Think of ALL THE MANY who LOVE the website and the new communication tool!

Happy New Year!
Dawn

We have been very lucky in that no one in our class has asked to be excluded from the site. We do have classmates that will not sign on or come to reunions because of high school being such a bad time in their lives. Our class is relatively small compared to a lot of yours. We had 156 in our graduating class. I have about 180 plus on the list which includes ( as many of you did ), people that didn't finish with us for one reason or another. We do know where many of these classmates are that haven't signed on but we leave their information blank only to be filled in by them if they want. This way no one can say we are giving out information without their permission.

Happy New Year to all!

I too have had one classmate that asked to be removed from the site completely. He was involved legitimately in high level security and any info on the internet regarding him was not appropriate or safe.

He was gracious in his request and I gave him several choices for limiting his personal information. The right decision was to remove his name completely.

I had no problem with this and I get my feelings hurt when someone unsubscribes to our emails!

Cheryl

I realize this is an old thread, but I have a new twist on the situation and am soliciting advice. I had a classmate with a unique name, request their name be removed from our website due to "to my interest for not to be exposed to public
for private matters".

Please, please - I do not want to be insensitive here. And let me go on record as saying it is NOT my intention to be discrimanitory.

The name would identify this individual as having heritage somewhere in the middle eastern countries. I could not tell the gender by the name nor the exact country of origin - so my first assumption was that maybe this was a women hiding from potential family violence, so I quickly removed the individual.

Upon further reflection, I questioned my initial assumption and googled the name. I found very little information at all (only 34 entries) due to the uniqueness of the name with six of those entrees being from our classmate website. There were several regarding someone with this name involved in a lawsuit appeal with the federal government in 1991. I also found a few links to a different class website (non class creator) in another state but the same graduating year. Having the same name for the same year with a school in another state which does not show up anywhere else on google seems fairly odd.

In this day and age it is truly unusual to not have some type of personal information available on the web about ourselves whether we like it or not. His email address indicates his connection to a clinical chemical company that *appears* to be in another state (what little I could pull together), but the phone number provided was with a local area code.

When taking all of these factors into the equation, this situation has raised a concern to me. I realize perfectly well that I could be putting 2+2 together and coming up with 5.

My dilemma is should something like this be reported to allow the feds to sort it out or should I just drop it? I hesitate to make something out of nothing, but would hate to reflect somewhere down the road that my inaction hurt any of my fellow countrymen. And that realization includes this person. What if my raising the red flag somehow creates an injustice for this person as well? What if they simply want a very restricted flow of their information?

It is indeed quite a paradox. Suggestions?

Susie, if you want to have some viewership for your question, I strongly suggest you re-enter it as a New Topic. You'll get significantly more responses if you do it that way vs. responding here.

First, my website is less than 3 months old, and if someone asked not to be included then I would remove them in a heartbeat. There are many reasons that situation could occur, from high security military background (fits me as military retired), to family issues, to literally a criminal record. Who knows, I might have a classmate that is now part of a Federal Witness Protection program..... We have to honor those requests.

That said, yesterday I realized that all my deceased classmates have bunches of stuff available on google. Guess what, it is because they have never registered as a classmate and the following box is not checked.

Profile Visibility: Allow only fellow Classmates to view my Profile details. This will block the public and search engines from accessing your Profile. Leave this box unchecked if you wish to allow the public (friends, co-workers, family members, etc.) to view your Profile details.

Obviously, my In Memory classmates from long past never joined the website and set this checkbox. Hence, google can collect any information in their Profile.

Carrying this further, actually ANY "Yet to Register" classmate does not have this box checked, therefore Google could in theory harvest addresses and phone numbers, I would think.

Concerning my In Memory classmates, I just went in and edited the box to exclude public search engines. Honestly, I think the program should automatically check that box as soon as a classmate is recognized as deceased. There are surprisingly a good number of people with a Line of Credit loan, when they have been deceased many years.

The profile is built separate from the in Memory pages. There is no connection between the profile visibility check box and the In Memory page listings. To not have the In Memory page show up in Google you can require a password for that page and implement it by going to > Edit Site Pages > and check Password. The next time Google triws to go to that page, and then can't they will be dropped from the Google search results.

We do not show classmates addresses and phone numbers to non classmates. The google bot cannot login to see this info.

By having password protected the In Memory page, which we see you have already done, you have applied this protection to all the classmates going forward. Again, the pages will be dropped when the Google bot revisits the page and can't get in.

Scott Mastenbrook wrote:

AH!. Thanks for that information. I'm glad that is the case. I suspect password protecting was my early weakness getting all setup.

Additionally, in the Administration of Classmates, I changed the default as shown below. Perhaps I should change back???

By default Classmate data you have entered will not be displayed on your Classmate Profiles page until a Classmate has created his or her own account. By clicking the second radio button below you can override this default setting and choose to display all Admin-entered Classmate data even if a Classmate has not yet joined your site. I chose the 2nd choice instead of the first (default).

Do not show Admin-entered Classmate Profile details prior to Classmate joining the site.
Show Admin-entered Classmate Profile details prior to Classmate joining the site.
Allow only registered members to see the "Show Yearbook Photos" option.

Correct - the best way is to choose the option Do not show Admin-entered Classmate Profile details prior to Classmate joining the site. (Unless you have a specific need to show classmate info for non members)