Ancestry.com Inc.

A moderator needs to check the page before this notice can be removed. Visit the noticeboard or the appeals channel in either Zulip or Discord to request removal. Articles must provide verifiable, credible evidence for their claims and avoid relying on forum posts, personal blogs, or other unverifiable sources. You can help by replacing weak citations with reputable reporting, corporate communications, receipts, repair logs, or independent investigative coverage that demonstrates the systemic relevance required by the Mission statement and Moderator Guidelines . Their business model centers around subscription plans which have the following restrictions. Consumers need to cancel at least two days before the renewal date or trial expiration.[[2]]( Limited to narrow, front-loaded refund windows.[ how? ] Only long-term commitments, such as 6-month and 12-month plans. [citation needed (27 Jan 2026)] Ancestry.com was involved in a data breach where about 300,000 email addresses, usernames, and plaintext passwords were exposed. The breach happened in 2015, but it wasn’t until late 2017 when it was finally discovered and confirmed.[[3]]( Ancestry.com may charge a cancellation fee for "Subscriptions Longer than a Month, Billed Monthly" if users do not cancel within the first 14 days.[[2]]( [[4]]( Where offered, some subscriptions longer than a month may be eligible for monthly billing. Even though you will be billed monthly, you are committing to the entire length of your subscription (e.g. 6 months or 12 months). Ancestry's older price pages showed an offer which followed these cancellation terms, along with a citation showing the commitment, but this offer has since been removed from the page.[[5]]( RootsWeb, an Ancestry service, suffered a significant data breach. A file containing the access data of approximately 297.8 thousand users was publicly accessible on its server from November 2015 to December 2017.[[6]]( [[7]]( [[3]]( The company published a security update on its official website, which is now unavailable, stating that it temporarily shut down RootsWeb and locked all compromised Ancestry accounts, requiring users to change their passwords.[[8]]( Below is part of the full statement: We also reviewed the RootsWeb file to see if any of the account information overlapped with existing accounts on Ancestry sites. We did confirm that a very small number of accounts – less than one percent of our total customer group – used the same account credentials on both Rootsweb and an Ancestry commercial site. We are currently contacting these customers. In all cases, any user whose account had its associated email/username and password included on the file has had their accounts locked and will need to create a new password the next time they visit. First, for the approximately 55,000 customers who used the same credentials at RootsWeb’s surname list and Ancestry – whether currently active or not – we have locked their Ancestry accounts and will require that they create a new password the next time they visit. We have also sent them emails to alert them to the situation. Though we have seen no activity that indicates these accounts have been compromised, we believe taking this additional measure is the right step to ensure the security of these customers. If you have not received an email or a notice requiring you to change your password, you have not been affected. Again, this issue involves less than one percent of our users, so there is a very good chance your account wasn’t involved. Second, we have temporarily taken RootsWeb offline, and are working to ensure that all data is saved and preserved to the best of our ability. As RootsWeb is a free and open community that has been largely built by its users, we may not be able to salvage everything as we work to resolve this issue and enhance the RootsWeb infrastructure. If you are a customer whose account was impacted, you will receive an email telling you that you need