Private Spaces announced for FamilySearch Family Tree

If you have been on FamilySearch.org Family Tree program in the last few days, you probably noticed a banner such as this one:

I had heard something about this change, but was waiting to see what the details would be. Apparently, Ron Tanner, product manager for the Family Tree program, gave some of the details that were quoted in a blog post by The Ancestry Insider entitled "Ron Tanner Announces Private Spaces at #BYUFHGC." During this conference, I was in Salt Lake City attending the International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies Conference.

I do not wish to simply repeat what the Ancestry Insider had to say, so I will refer you to his rather extensive explanation. But I will quote from the Family Tree Help menu on "Understanding Private Spaces"

Issues Addressed

• What is Private Spaces?
• Will living people I add to Family Tree automatically become deceased?
• Why do I see different PIDs on each family member's account?
• Does editing living members in Family Tree update LDS Church Membership Records?
• Are living duplicates automatically going to be merged when a person dies?

Solution

• Each user of Family Tree has a private space. Private spaces help manage data privacy and confidentiality for each user.
• All living people and their relationships are stored in a private space.
• Currently, private spaces cannot be shared.
• Each owner of a copy can modify it independently from others.
• Deceased persons should each be represented only one time in Family Tree and have a common PID.
• But a living person can be represented in multiple private spaces as a different Family Tree person, and that person will have a different Person Identifier number (PID) in each private space.
• Searching Family Tree using a living person's name will not find him or her. Searching by the PID will not find him or her in any other account besides the one that uses the number you are searching for.
• Living people cannot be sourced.
• Family Tree does not compute living people, even after they are older than 110 years. Users will need to mark their copy of the individuals as deceased and then search for any possible duplicates.

You may also want to refer to the explanation in "How Family Tree displays living people" and "Visibility of living people on Family Tree."

This is certainly going to raise a lot of questions.