Ancestry Terms and Conditions

This document governs the terms and conditions under which Ancestry.com LLC and its affiliates provide genealogy research, DNA testing, subscription, and related services to users globally. The agreement states that users grant Ancestry a royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual, worldwide license to use, copy, display, and distribute user-submitted content, including family trees, photos, and stories, and separately authorizes Ancestry to use aggregated and anonymized data derived from user-submitted information for product development and research purposes. Notably, the terms include a mandatory arbitration clause with class action waiver applicable to US users, a provision permitting Ancestry to share user data with third-party partners and affiliated companies, and a clause asserting that genetic data submitted through AncestryDNA may be used beyond the immediate test result context subject to separate consent under the AncestryDNA Terms; the breadth of the content license and the interplay between the main ToS and the DNA-specific terms creates layered consent obligations that users may not readily distinguish. The document engages GDPR and UK GDPR for EU and UK users, CCPA and CPRA for California residents, BIPA considerations for Illinois users given biometric-adjacent DNA data, and FTC Act jurisdiction over consumer data practices broadly; state genetic privacy laws in states such as California, Texas, and Illinois may impose additional constraints on how genetic data collected through AncestryDNA is used or shared beyond what the ToS asserts. The arbitration and class action waiver provisions require evaluation under applicable state law, as several jurisdictions have challenged or limited the enforceability of such clauses in consumer contracts, and the perpetual content license may interact with GDPR right-to-erasure obligations in ways the document does not fully resolve.