Is myheritage.com Safe?

Warning: DO NOT add the toolbar from this site! Adding the toolbar is the only way you will be able to use the celebrity look-a-like feature. Once installed, it will hijack the search engines in your browser and cause all sorts of headaches. It's a pain to remove once you've installed it. I learned the hard way.

Run do not walk away from this phishing site! Their web site looks real good. With lots of "Testimonials" and demos. "The best free genealogy software in the world 12,888,083 downloads so far, but who's counting...35 languages to choose from"! [from their ad] Do not believe it for a min. Free or trial account MUST download a genealogy file to activate the account. Only one problem they take your GeD file and give you nothing. I upload a tree with 1842 People, 695 Photos, 199 Stories and 1562 records. According to them I uploaded 342 sources and NOTHING else. Ok, maybe the file was corrupted. So I uploaded my backup file. This time I had nothing at all on the file. “Meet our 51,879,661 members!” [from their ad] *snorts*. I went to their member forms looking for help, had to go through another long registration process. When I finally got on the boards I knew I had been had. There were only 129 posts TOTAL on the boards and most of them were ***** Were it said “number of registered members” the number was zero! I immediately tried to delete my account but was booted off the site first. When I tried to log in again they said no record of my email. Beware of free tree builders! Dancing with Ghosts

When you download the "free" software and install it, you are then required to become a registered member on the site before you can use the software. There is no mention of this on the site prior to downloading. After installation, the software hijacks FireFox by setting search.myheritage.com as the starting the page when FireFox opens. No notifications were giving that this would happen. Uninstalling the software took a couple of tries as the software is persistent. I personally feel that the changes to my system and the difficulty in removing the software makes this vendor unreliable and untrustworthy.

I found the site to be an exceptional Genealogy research tool. It takes about 10 min to search the many resource databases unless multiple spelling variations are used, in which case it takes longer. I find this a reasonable amount of time considering the thousand or more databases Heritage searches through. Also, it would take me forever if I was to do the searches myself. So please be ***** is worth it for most.