Last night Grant Villetard spoke about the good, the bad and the ugly results of using the internet for recording your genealogy research. Ultimately, we must all make our own decision about where to place our information: keep it all on the internet, keep it all on a PC or do both. Since the future seems to be "the cloud," we all need to keep the following in mind.
The Good: comparing your research with others, contacting distant relatives, the provider does backups, accessing the data from different hardware platforms.
The Bad: their main objective is new members, data can be wrong, you must have internet access to reach your data, program can change without notice, cost can change, privacy issues.
The Ugly: if the site goes out of business, your information is gone, it's easy to join but hard to cancel, you are trusting a business organization, the business could be sold, if you stop paying access to data will be terminated.
Grant's handout included a list of sites for building family trees on the internet--both free and fee-based in nature, but with a caution that even the free sites may charge for accessing data.
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