Your family file is read by your own browser, on your own computer. No name, date, place, note or photo from it is ever sent to GED-VIEW or to anyone else. A connected media folder is read from your own disk in the same way.

That is a claim. Here is how to check it instead of taking it on trust.

How to check

  1. Open the browser's developer tools (F12 in Chrome, Edge or Firefox; Option, Command and I on a Mac) and click the Network tab.
  2. Open the sample tree, or your own GEDCOM file, in GED-VIEW.
  3. Click through the tree, a profile and the map.
  4. Read the list. Every line is one request the page made. Click any line to see exactly what was sent.

What appears: the app's own files (scripts, styles, fonts, a language file, the guide texts), and when the map opens, pieces of the map file and lists of place names, all from ged-view.com. There is also one small count message, described below. The file's name and the file's contents appear in no request. Nothing carries a person, a date, a place or a photo.

What stays on your computer

A connected media folder is read from your own disk to show the photos, and nothing from it is sent. The files you open, your settings, pinned and hidden items, saved files and recent exports are kept in the browser's own storage on your device (localStorage and IndexedDB), so the tree is there on your next visit. They can be cleared at any time under Saved Data or from the browser's settings. There are no cookies.

What the browser does send

A daily count. GED-VIEW keeps a simple count of how many people use the site each day, which pages are used most and which errors happen most. The count says which page, what happened and which website the visitor came from, if any. It carries no name, no account, no cookie and nothing from the file.

If something breaks: an error code, the type of error, where in the app's code it happened, the page it happened on, and the app's version. Never a message, never anything from the file.

Both go to one person. Aleksej builds GED-VIEW on his own, and it is a large project; the counts are how he sees what people use and what breaks, so he knows what to fix and what to work on next. Nobody else sees them.

What is typed into the support, review or updates forms, and nothing else: the app adds no version and no browser details. What those forms are used for is in the Terms of Use.

Map data and place lists, downloaded from ged-view.com as files. The street map is one large file on GED-VIEW's own server, fetched in pieces as the map moves. The place lists are fetched by the first letters of a name and matched in the browser; no place name is sent anywhere to be looked up. This is where GED-VIEW differs from most pages with a map: they ask a map company (Google, Mapbox, a tile server) for every area a visitor looks at, and that company sees it. GED-VIEW serves its own map, so no map company sees where a family lived.

A photo that the file points to by a web address is not fetched. GED-VIEW shows only files from the connected media folder.

Checked, not promised

There are no third-party scripts on the site: no analytics service, no advertising, no fonts from a font service, no map or video embedded from another company. Every file the page loads comes from ged-view.com, which the Network tab shows as well.

What this does not cover

  • Your own computer. The file on the disk, and the browser's own storage, are there for anyone who can use the machine.
  • Browser extensions. An extension can read any page you visit. A private window turns most of them off.
  • The site the file came from. A tree on Ancestry or MyHeritage lives on their servers regardless of what happens to the export.
  • Email. Whoever runs the recipient's mail server can read an attachment.

The upload guide goes into each of these.

Sharing, planned

Sharing a tree by link is planned. The tree will be encrypted in the browser before it leaves, and the key that unlocks it will be part of the link itself. The person sharing sends that link to their relatives themselves, by whatever means they choose, so the key never reaches GED-VIEW and the server holds only a locked copy that nobody there can open. The person sharing keeps full control: they decide who gets a link, how many people can open it and for how long, they see what each link has been used for, and they can switch any link off at any moment. A link that got out further than intended is simply revoked, and the tree behind it is locked again. Recipients will need no account.

If anything on this page stops being true, the page is wrong and should be reported through the support form.