REMOVE PUBLIC DOCUMENTS FROM PRIVATE CONTROL
Recently I started looking into my family history, and I cannot even begin to put into words my disgust at finding that the only way to gain access to ostensibly public government documents was through paid services such as ancestry.com. It seems that at some point, with no approval from the people, the US government signed over our vital documents to private enterprise. While this is primarily an issue in terms of freedom of information (I should not have to pay a private company to access “public” documents concerning myself or my family), this is also problematic in several other ways. First off, those documents contain a lot of sensitive, private information, including birth dates, addresses, and social security numbers. All of this information has now been handed over to unregulated corporations. Second, this decision was made without the consent of the people. Our government turned over our family histories without consulting us. Please sign the white house petition in the link to ask the White House to return these documents to the public sphere, to be administrated by the government and with access granted to all.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov//petition/remove-control-vital-documents-and-records-control-private-companies-such-ancestrycom