Privacy, corrections and removal
last changed 2026-10-01
Who runs this
Academic Ancestry is a personal, non-commercial project. Everything about this notice, and every request under it, goes to academicancestry@proton.me.
What the site shows about people
For a person: their name, who supervised their thesis and whose theses they supervised, and who examined, refereed or sat on the committee or jury of a thesis. For a thesis: its title, year, institution and level, doctoral and, where a repository's records carry them, master's and bachelor's. A birth year is shown only where Wikidata records one. Coauthors, when asked for, come from OpenAlex.
The site holds nothing else about the people it names: no contact details, no addresses, no photographs.
Where it comes from
Only from sources already public: Wikidata's doctoral advisor statements, the thesis records universities and national libraries publish in their open repositories, and OpenAlex. Each entry names the record it was read from, and the sources lists every repository read and every one known and not read. Nobody is asked for information about themselves or about anyone else.
Because the entries are read from public records and not from the people they name, this notice is how the project tells them. Writing to each person is not possible: the records carry no contact details.
Why, and on what basis
The purpose is to make the public record of who taught whom easier to see and to follow: the history of scholarship as the theses themselves record it. Under the GDPR the basis is legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)). The records are already public, they concern a person's academic work and not their private life, and anyone named can have their entry removed, as below, without giving a reason.
Having an entry corrected or removed
If the site names you, you can ask what it holds about you, have a mistake corrected, object to being shown, or have your entry removed. Write to academicancestry@proton.me with your name and a link to the sheet that shows you; every person's card on the sheet has a link that starts that message with the entry named. You may be asked for enough to show that the entry is yours.
A removed person is taken off every page, list, search result and answer of this site, and stays off when the records are read again. Requests are answered within a month, usually much sooner. The site keeps one thing about a removed entry: its identifier, on a list that is never published, so that it stays removed.
Removal here does not change the source. The thesis record stays with the repository that published it and a Wikidata statement stays on Wikidata; to change those, ask the repository or edit Wikidata.
You also have the right to complain to the data protection authority where you live.
Search engines
Search engines are asked not to read the pages of people: the site's robots.txt closes the routes those pages are drawn from, so a person's sheet is not offered to be indexed.
What the site records about its readers
No account, no cookies, no analytics, no advertising. Your browser keeps, on your own device, the sheet's settings (the theme, the form and bounds, the tips already shown) and the last five people you opened; none of it is sent anywhere.
The server keeps no access log of readers' addresses; an address reaches its logs only when a request fails. It counts requests by address for one minute, in memory, to stop one address from flooding it, and it logs which page was asked for and how long it took, without the address.
A question typed into the ask dock is sent, with the sheet on screen, to Anthropic's API to be answered; the site does not keep it.
The typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts, so your browser contacts Google's servers when a page opens. The server is hosted with Amazon Web Services in the United States.
Changes
When this notice changes, the date at its top changes with it.